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.
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.
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.
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.
dzonga•1h ago
retrocog•35m ago
ainiriand•7m ago