Recently updated PIE extensions #15 (since November 5th, 2026) 35 PHP Pie extensions were updated. They fall into three groups: Native GUI and graphics bindings (12): the php-io-extensions family (SDL3, GLFW, Vulkan, OpenGL, Metal, AppKit, GTK, Qt, fontconfig, rasterize, fb) plus phpolygon/php-vio. Rust-powered (5): liter-llm, corvus-json-schema, expanse, phit and mongo-php-async-driver, which state Rust as their […]
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Nov
Nov
Partial Function Application in PHP 8.6 use cases Here is a classic PHP line: It could be possibly shortened with a string, but that would look like so PHP 4 that this post starts with an arrow function. It is short, the intent is clear, and not so recent PHP versions made it cheap to […]
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Nov
Nov
PHP 8.6 Rewrites Some of Your Calls Before You Notice Most PHP speed-ups ask something of you: upgrade the extension, turn on the JIT, rewrite the hot loop in C. The PHP 8.6 changes in the NEWS file ask nothing. The compiler looks at a few specific call shapes and emits something else in their […]
05
Nov
Nov
Recently updated PIE extensions #14 (since October 29th, 2026) 25 PHP Pie extensions were updated. flow-php/arrow-ext (0.47.0): Apache Arrow and Parquet bindings for flow-php/parquet (Rust) phpolygon/php-vio (2.40.3): PHP extension for GPU rendering (OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal), audio, video recording, streaming, and input mongodb/mongodb-extension (2.5.6): MongoDB driver extension flow-php/flow-php-ext (0.47.0): Flow PHP native extension (Rust) – native […]
03
Nov
Nov
Eight PHP Myths That Need to Finally Retire PHP left bad memories with a slice of its audience, 20 years ago. Indeed, some of it was earned. The language genuinely did ship some bad ideas in the ancient PHP 4 and early PHP 5 era, and recent memory-safety CVEs in the Zend Engine are a […]
02
Nov
Nov
PHP can run DOOM. And in several ways Can it run DOOM? is the internet’s oldest benchmark. Printers, thermostats, pregnancy tests: if it has a CPU, someone has ported DOOM to it. PHP, the language of personal home page counters and extensive frameworks, is no exception. In fact, DOOM is also the de facto “Hello […]
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Oct
Oct
Telling Your Terminal What Your PHP CLI Is Doing: OSC 7501 Comes to PHP The problem: you keep guessing the CLI’s status If you have more than one terminal tab open, you know the routine. You start a long-running command in one tab, switch to another, and come back periodically to check if it finished: […]
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Recently updated PIE extensions #13 (since October 23rd, 2026) 43 PHP Pie extensions were updated. iliaal/mdparser (0.8.2): Native C CommonMark + GitHub Flavored Markdown parser for PHP, targeting CommonMark 0.31 + GFM. ~10-20x faster than pure-PHP parsers, zero runtime dependencies. phpolygon/php-vio (2.38.1): PHP extension for GPU rendering (OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal), audio, video recording, streaming, and […]
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Oct
Oct
The Advantage of Fixing All PHP Warnings I have spent a ungodly amount of my life reading other people’s PHP warnings. Scanning codebases for a living does that to you. And after a few million lines, I’ve come to a conclusion that sounds boring until you think about what it actually means: a warning is […]
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Oct
Recently updated PIE extensions #12 (since October 15th, 2026) 24 PHP Pie extensions were updated. phpolygon/php-vio (2.35.0): PHP extension for GPU rendering (OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal), audio, video recording, streaming, and input iliaal/php-excel (2.9.1): PHP extension for reading and writing Excel files using LibXL iliaal/php_clickhouse (0.13.0): Native PHP extension for ClickHouse using the official ClickHouse/clickhouse-cpp client. […]
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Oct
Oct
Every Road Around the Zend Engine I’ve been using PHP forever, and so I’ve relied on the Zend Engine. After all, it is the core of PHP. The PHP source goes into the Zend Engine, gets parsed into an AST, compiled to opcodes, and executed. One request, one process. That’s just what php does when […]