PHP is the effective lingua franca of cheap web hosting. You know, that thing costing 5 bucks a month, where your uncle hosts a WordPress blog about fishing and his personal email. You know, that crappy service that comes with some gigabytes on a shared server, a nice LAMP stack on top, a shitty cPanel and WHM combo to manage things… and SFTP access to upload pictures from Jamie and Larry’s wedding in Chattanooga. Woop woop!
This is the kingdom of PHP. This is the world where PHP has been evolving into for the past 30 years. But there is a man called Kévin Dunglas (yes, with an accent mark on the e) who thinks that it is time for a change, and that PHP can effectively be more than that.
(Talk about having faith.)
Because, let us be honest here: there is a world in which PHP has never truly felt at home; and that is, containers and Kubernetes. Yes, good old Kubernetes, that thing that during the past 11 years has effectively become the “state of the art” for companies to host applications in “the Cloud” (with a capital C, please).
And here is the thing: of all contemporary programming languages, PHP is among the few (if not the only one) that has not really shown a strong presence in that space. Of course, lots of very “professional” software developers are probably happy about that. But not Kévin.
This man is one of the founders of a small French software cooperative called Les Tilleuls with offices in Lille, Paris, Nantes, and Lyon. A cooperative, of all things. How could we not celebrate the fact that software engineers have decided to finally start organizing themselves and their work using the most democratic and progressive ways available in common law?
His team has decided to tackle the problem of “PHP in 2025”, which can be largely be understood as “PHP in Kubernetes”, and they succeeded in such a spectacular way, that even the PHP Foundation noticed… and ended up adopting their solution as the new standard for PHP.
This month’s Vidéothèque movie is, precisely, Kévin explaining the ins and outs of their solution for the future of PHP, called FrankenPHP, at the last PHPverse 2025 online conference, celebrating the 30 years of PHP, organized by JetBrains, the makers of the PHPStorm IDE.
We do not often dedicate a whole article to a single piece of technology in this magazine, as our aim is to give larger views about our craft. But we do believe that PHP deserves a better runtime environment today; not tomorrow, not in 10 years, but today (actually, it deserved it a decade ago, but better late than never).
FrankenPHP not only makes it easier for PHP to run in containers and Kubernetes (not that it was impossible, but it was certainly not straightforward), but it also enables much more than that. In essence, FrankenPHP is a reimplementation of the PHP language runtime and library using the Go programming language (sounds familiar?) and unlocking, at the same time, new possibilities for PHP applications.
Not only that, but FrankenPHP is 100% compatible with other famous runtimes for PHP, such as the Zend engine, which means that applications are guaranteed to work with it without any kind of rewriting or adaptation.
In all justice, history teach us that this is not the first time someone has tried to come up with an alternative PHP runtime, or a way to interoperate / transpile / generate PHP code somehow; let us review some powerful ancestors, some of which you might not be aware of.
- The official Zend engine, in active development since 1999, has been the default runtime for PHP for over a quarter of a century now.
- There used to be PHP support in the Parrot Virtual Machine.
- There was a short-lived thing called “Hippy VM” around 2012.
- How can we forget Facebook’s own “Hack” transpiler, announced in 2014?
- Somebody tried to run PHP in Java giving rise to Quercus.
- And of course, somebody else tried to run PHP in .NET and then .NET from PHP, because why not. There was even a transpiler to convert PHP into .NET CIL called Phalanger.
- Speaking about transpilers, one of the best known was HipHop, to translate PHP code into C++, because why not.
- The Russian team behind the ВКонтакте social network developed KPHP.
- For those stuck with old hosting providers, or legacy operating systems without access to the latest versions of PHP, Phabel transpiled PHP 8.0 code into PHP code compatible with versions 5 or 7, security be damned.
- More transpilers: Phel and Pharen compile Lisp into PHP.
- Haxe is a cross-platform language that also compiles into PHP.
- Oh, and let us not forget about IBM and their support for PHP, past and present.
- Honorable mentions: Kira, Tagua VM, Zephir, Phug, PHP7, and more!
So what does make FrankenPHP different? The fact that it single-handedly solved the most important problems that PHP developers faced, providing a faster and smaller runtime, and projecting the language into the present… and the future.
Of course, FrankenPHP is not the only one with such objectives: projects such as RoadRunner and Open Swoole are also throwing punches in this arena, and they all bring a promising future for PHP.
I am very enthusiastic about FrankenPHP, and even more so by the community spirit that drives it forward. You can feel the winds of change in the air of PHP. Laravel Octane optimizes app startup when running under FrankenPHP; some talk about a renaissance of the language; Maximiliano Firtman doubles down on server-side rendering with PHP in his own training classes; and Fireship is happy to explain PHP in 100 seconds, or to build the same app with 10 different languages, including, you guessed, PHP. Yes, Prime, PHP 8.4 is good and 8.5 will be even better.
PHP is the underdog, the Toyota Corolla, the poor cousin of programming languages; in this magazine we want to see it thrive and grow, and we cannot but cheer and support FrankenPHP, and hope that it will change the perception of the language in the near future. And we are happy to see that a cooperative, of all organizations, is the one driving behind the wheel.
Watch this month’s Vidéothèque movie, “FrankenPHP: Reinventing PHP for the Modern Web” on YouTube, and then continue browsing videos from JetBrains’ “PHP Annotated”, their YouTube channel dedicated to PHP.
Cover snapshot chosen by the author.