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.
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.
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.
Say this to the team behind Ladybird browser: https://awesomekling.substack.com/p/how-were-building-a-brow...
If it has remotely the same success, that would be a huge win for the ecosystem!
dzonga•2h ago
retrocog•1h ago
ainiriand•1h ago
IshKebab•38m ago
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•29m ago
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.
smt88•42m ago
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.
giancarlostoro•23m ago
testdelacc1•13m ago