Mago: A fast PHP toolchain written in Rust
19 comments
·September 13, 2025anta40
ivanjermakov
> The PHP runtime is incredibly complex
Say this to the team behind Ladybird browser: https://awesomekling.substack.com/p/how-were-building-a-brow...
darkamaul
So I guess this is `uv`, but for PHP?
If it has remotely the same success, that would be a huge win for the ecosystem!
aszen
No its different, php already has a good package manager, this is about formatting, linting and type checking
techtalsky
It's more like `ruff` for PHP.
dzonga
seems rust's biggest win was improving other languages toolchains and bringing increased productivity to those languages.
giancarlostoro
I am waiting for someone to build a modern scripting language in Rust that has the popularity and rich tooling and capabilities of Rust as a result.
retrocog
Not a bad win so far, right? One hand washes the other and both wash the face.
smt88
You're wrong because it's also incrementally replacing individual, high-risk components in Windows and Linux.
But even if you're not wrong, a major mission of Rust was to be a safer C/C++, and language tooling used to be dominated by those languages.
ainiriand
Do you really think that this is Rust's biggest win or are you just joking/trolling?
IshKebab
To be fair it is pretty significant. Especially uv. I don't know anything about PHP's existing toolchain but I do know that Python's is a horrifying mess, and uv basically fixes it.
It's a small thing in the Rust community but it's pretty huge in the world simply because there are so many Python developers (and also because of the extreme magnitude of improvement). Probably wouldn't have happened without Rust.
3eb7988a1663
Thanks to Rust, there are heaps of next generation CLI utilities that have come onto the scene in the past decade. Cross platform by default, UTF8 aware, more likely to be multi-threaded, simple distribution, and most importantly - improving on some unfortunate legacy API decisions.
Ripgrep, fd, tokei, Just, zellij, uv, and so forth. Porting languages has given the opportunity to remove some of the cruft decided on a whim in the 70s. None of these are world changing, but they do make life easier than the originals.
muglug
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
> 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
> 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
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
Interesting. Do you have any thoughts to share along the same lines about FrankenPHP?
muglug
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.
Raed667
Love seeing some Tunisian representation here ! Kudos on the project !
I initially thought this was a PHP implementation in Rust.... but it's not
Will Mago implement a PHP runtime?
Absolutely not. The PHP runtime is incredibly complex. Major efforts by large companies (e.g., Facebook's HHVM, VK's KPHP) have struggled to reach full parity with Zend Engine. Achieving this as a smaller project is infeasible and would lead to community fragmentation. We are focused on tooling, not runtimes.
https://mago.carthage.software/faq