Since 40% or what of all websites still run on WP, I decided [and please don't ask why, I have no idea what drove me] it could be useful to apply my C/C++ performance experience to a brand new from-scratch WP core to save about 50% of infrastructure while simultaneously increasing performance. With agent assisted coding I thought it could actually be doable to build out most of WP' API surface, and it was! (over multiple months)

Try the live demo, including wp-admin!

It shows WooCommerce + Elementor working, which is remarkable because I had to build an embeddable PHP runtime that covers most of Zend PHP's features for it. Runs 2x slower than Zend, but BookPress is still faster than a performance-tuned WP instance with OPCache, page cache and object caches.

I don't mean to replace WP, and am faithfully implementing the API to avoid any divergence or "BookPress" handling in plugins or themes. BookPress is meant to run alongside a PHP WP installation, with a single-command migrate and un-migrate.

Looking forward to what you all think.