muglug an hour ago

It is very cool that this exists, but the PHP community lacks the resources to see a non-PHP tool thrive.

Tools like Sorbet (C typechecker for Ruby) or tsgo (Go-based successor to TypeScript's typechecker) are only viable because big profitable companies can back them up with engineering hours.

  • hu3 42 minutes ago

    > PHP community lacks the resources to see a non-PHP tool thrive.

    Why do you think so?

    The PHP Foundation has raised over 2 million USD in contribution and has over 500K in their balance currently according to:

    https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation

    PHP has some well funded groups using it like Wordpress, Wikipedia, Laravel to name a few.

    And recently the PHP Foundation started officially sponsoring a Go project, FrankenPHP.

    https://thephp.foundation/blog/2025/05/15/frankenphp/

    So PHP looks like a friendly and well supported community to foster tooling made in other languages.

    • muglug 20 minutes ago

      > The PHP Foundation has raised over 2 million USD in contribution and has over 500K in their balance

      This is great, but it is still dwarfed by the amount Microsoft has spent on TypeScript and also by the amount Stripe has spent on Sorbet.

      500k is roughly comparable to the amount my previous company spent (grudgingly) to keep me employed and working on PHP tooling for a couple of years.

      • hu3 4 minutes ago

        True but TypeScript and Sorbet are magnitudes above linting and formatting PHP, in terms of challenge size.

        TypeScript is a very complex language with a huge mission. From the same creator of C#.

        Sorbet is trying to tame a dynamically typed language which supports monkey patching. Stripe can get away with it because they have close to infinite money and a large Ruby codebase.

        Meanwhile PHP is stable and typed. Parsing AST, linting and formatting are trivial in comparison to the examples you cited. Their package manager, composer, is also boring a stable, in a good way. Prime target for a second pass if need be.

  • retrocog an hour ago

    Interesting. Do you have any thoughts to share along the same lines about FrankenPHP?

    • muglug 24 minutes ago

      It's cool that it's part of the PHP foundation, but it's not all that complex.

      FrankenPHP has >100 contributors, including 3 very frequent ones, and about 17k lines of Go.

      Mago has 11 contributors, with just 1 very frequent one, and about 135k lines of Rust.

dzonga an hour ago

seems rust's biggest win was improving other languages toolchains and bringing increased productivity to those languages.

  • retrocog an hour ago

    Not a bad win so far, right? One hand washes the other and both wash the face.

  • ainiriand 22 minutes ago

    Do you really think that this is Rust's biggest win or are you just joking/trolling?

Raed667 an hour ago

Love seeing some Tunisian representation here ! Kudos on the project !