When PHP Reads Something Else: Visual Traps in Source Code PHP code is read by two very different audiences: human developers and the PHP parser. Humans read glyphs, the shapes our eyes recognise. The parser reads bytes or characters, raw octets encoded in a file. Most of the time these two views agree perfectly. Sometimes […]
10
Sep
Sep
Recently updated PIE extensions #6 (since September 3rd, 2026) 33 PHP Pie extensions were updated. intermaterium/duckeh (0.7.3): PHP extension for DuckDB iliaal/mdparser (0.6.1): 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 (2.11.0): PHP extension for GPU rendering (OpenGL, Vulkan, […]
09
Sep
Sep
PHP-Powered Government Websites by Country After reading the Digital Sovereignty Is Written in PHP, I became curious where in the world is PHP used in the governement. Governments may be large or small, and it may have several departements, ministries, cabinets or even local administrations with competing technologies. For this page, I only collected at […]
03
Sep
Sep
Recently updated PIE extensions #5 (since August 27th, 2026) 27 PHP Pie extensions were updated. iliaal/mdparser (0.6.0): Native C CommonMark + GitHub Flavored Markdown parser for PHP, targeting CommonMark 0.31 + GFM. ~10-20x faster than pure-PHP parsers, zero runtime dependencies. iliaal/php-excel (2.7.0): PHP extension for reading and writing Excel files using LibXL mongodb/mongodb-extension (2.5.0): MongoDB […]
03
Sep
Sep
Tree-sitter and PHP: Two Directions, Endless Possibilities Tree-sitter is a very popular library in the computer ecosystem at large. It powers syntax highlighting in Neovim, structural search in VS Code, and a growing wave of static analysis tools, including in PHP environment. What makes it compelling is a combination of properties rarely found together: a […]
29
Aug
Aug
TypePHP, native PHP, NativePHP: the ecosystem has a vocabulary problem PHP names things by accretion. A word gets used for something, then reused for something adjacent, then reused again by a project that picked the name because it was available on Packagist. Nobody arbitrates. Ten years later you have a conference hallway conversation where two […]
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Aug
Aug
Recently updated PIE extensions #4 (since August 21st, 2026) 25 PHP Pie extensions were updated. hmennen90/php-steamworks (v0.15.0): PHP extension providing access to the Valve Steamworks SDK via a flat C API symfony/deepclone (v0.8.3): Export any serializable PHP values as pure arrays – accelerator for Symfony’s DeepCloner php-debugger/php-debugger (0.3.0): A lightweight, high-performance PHP debugger extension. Comptible […]
26
Aug
Aug
The Path Not Taken: everything that can go wrong with a path A path is a string. And, just like concatenation, this is the source of all our troubles. PHP treats it as a string, the filesystem treats it as a sequence of bytes with opinions, and Windows treats it as a suggestion. Somewhere in […]
20
Aug
Aug
Recently updated PIE extensions (since August 13th, 2026) 25 PHP Pie extensions were updated. bsn4/grpc (v0.4.0): Rust-based gRPC extension for PHP — drop-in replacement for ext-grpc paragonie/ext-pqcrypto (v0.3.2): PHP extension for post-quantum cryptography (ML-KEM, X-Wing, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA) mongodb/mongodb-extension (2.4.0): MongoDB driver extension phalcon/cphalcon (v5.19.0): Phalcon is an open source web framework delivered as a C […]
06
Aug
Aug
Recently updated PIE extensions (since July 30th, 2026) #1 17 PHP Pie extensions were updated. php-debugger/php-debugger (0.2.3): A lightweight, high-performance PHP debugger extension. Comptible with Xdebug step-debugging. phalcon/cphalcon (v5.18.2): Phalcon is an open source web framework delivered as a C extension for the PHP language providing high performance and lower resource consumption. xberg-io/tree-sitter-language-pack (v1.14.3): Pre-compiled […]
15
Jul
Jul
flock() is a Suggestion, Not a Law I spend a fair amount of my professional life staring at static analysis reports for a living, and every so often a rule reminds me that I’ve been trusting a piece of the standard library a little too much. This week it was flock(). The original question was: […]