Asynchronous PHP development can be the best tool for your work

As PHP developers, we are used to worrying about sockets. "PHP scripts should be dead soon", some people will say so, but there are other different voices "then why don't you use Node to achieve this?"

 The problem is, these opinions will make the development of PHP kernel and Attempts at surrounding ecosystems have stalled.

Don’t get me wrong: PHP was not built to use an event loop, and PHP was not built for asynchronous development. Any attempt to achieve this kind of thing defeats the purpose of PHP as a language. However, many people believe that PHP can change to suit these tasks.

For beginners, there is ReadPHP. This is a set of libraries that rely on extensions and some core functions to simulate event loops. There are other things reactive, like allowing and partially functional programs, but the focus is on reactive programming and event loops.

Then there’s Hack, a superset of PHP (developed by Facebook) designed to provide static typing. In addition, Hack also provides an asynchronous language architecture. Let's not forget that Facebook is writing the PHP language specification. They are developing HHVM, the first major competitor to the traditional PHP interpreter. They can shape new versions of PHP core without pushing code to PHP core.

Finally, modern PHP supports many asynchronous functions and extensions. It may not have started with an event loop, but there are signs that PHP is kind of moving in an asynchronous direction.

I’m excited about the advent of asynchronous PHP because I’ve talked about it and done development work on it. What I want to achieve is to enable every PHP developer to explore the concepts and tools of asynchronous programming. Realize that this is within our control, and that we can face PHP's past and performance without shame.

PHP may not be the best tool for the job, but if we don’t explore asynchronous PHP, it will never become the best tool for the job.