Agents Did Not Kill the “Our Team Knows PHP” Argument

There is a particular kind of blog post that starts with a confident thesis and ends with a shrug. The thesis is usually “X is…

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,…

Partial Function Application in PHP 8.6 use cases

Here is a classic PHP line:

<?php
$names = array_map(fn($user) => strtoupper($user), $users);
?>

It could be possibly shortened with a string, but that would look like…

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…

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),…

PhpStorm 2026.3, the third major update of the year, is here! This release includes a new workspace for agentic development and multi-agent setups, support for PHP 8.6, improvements to remote development and WSL scenarios, and PHP code insight enhancements.

Download PhpStorm 2026.3

Growing Old With PHP, 2026

In 2020, Exakat looked at its corpus of PHP projects and reviewed them by the date of their last commit. Six years later, we are running the same analysis, with…

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.…

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…

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…