I have been a PHP developer for decades. I love the expressiveness of the language, its "get things done" philosophy, and its ubiquity. But for a long time, I’ve shared a frustration with many of you: PHP has been trapped.

While other languages like Rust, Go, and JavaScript expanded into systems programming, mobile apps, and edge computing, PHP remained locked in the server-side request/response cycle. If I wanted to build a high-performance CLI tool, I had to switch to Go. If I wanted to run logic on an iPhone, I had to learn Swift. If I wanted to build an AI agent, I was forced into Python.

I refused to accept that limitation.

Over the last year, I have been quietly building the primitives to break PHP out of its silo. I built php2ir to compile PHP to native machine code. I built php-ios to run PHP natively on an iPhone. I built microphp to push PHP onto ESP32 microcontrollers.

But separate tools are not enough. To truly compete with ecosystems like Rust or Flutter, we need a unified workflow.

Today, I am unveiling the capstone of this vision: php-universe and the px CLI. This is my attempt to give PHP its "Cargo moment"—a single toolchain to write once and compile everywhere.

The Philosophy: PHP as a Systems Language

When I designed php-universe, I wanted to change the question from "How do I configure PHP-FPM?" to "Where do I want to deploy?"

The heart of this new system is px (PHP Extended). It’s a meta-compiler that orchestrates the specialized engines I’ve developed. Instead of a composer.json file defining libraries, you use a universe.toml file to define targets.

Here is why I built it this way.

1. True Native Compilation (No C Required)

Most attempts to compile PHP have just been transpilers to C. I wanted something better. With php2ir, I built a pipeline that goes directly from PHP 8.x source code to LLVM IR.

This means we aren’t just wrapping the interpreter; we are applying LLVM’s massive suite of optimizations (LTO, PGO) to PHP code. When you run px build --target=native, you get a standalone binary that rivals Go in portability and speed.

2. Mobile Logic Without the Web View

One of my most requested projects is php-ios. I built this because I believe in "Local-First" software. We shouldn’t need a server to run complex business logic.

php-ios embeds a static PHP runtime directly into your iOS app. It is fully App Store compliant because it doesn’t download executable code; it bundles your scripts as resources. With px, this becomes seamless: you write your logic in PHP, and px bundles it into a static library ready for Xcode.

3. The "Killer App": Edge AI Agents

This is where I am most excited. The world is moving toward autonomous AI agents, and I was tired of Python having all the fun.

I built php-embeddings to handle vector databases purely in PHP, using SIMD-style operations for speed. I built php-querylang so these agents could query their own memory using SQL-like syntax on native arrays.

When you combine this with php2wasm (my WebAssembly target), you get something incredible: A PHP AI agent that runs in the browser or on a Cloudflare Worker, searching its own vector memory, with zero latency.

No Python. No servers. Just compiled PHP.

The Architecture of px

I designed the px CLI to be the glue that holds this ecosystem together.

• The Orchestrator: It reads your universe.toml and decides which engine to invoke.
• The dependency shaker: For native builds, we don’t want a massive vendor/ folder. px analyzes your code and shakes out unused classes to keep binaries small.
• The Safety Net: With php-supply-chain-guard, I integrated security auditing directly into the build process, scanning binary extensions for backdoors before they are linked.

Why This Matters

I am not trying to replace PHP’s role in the web. I am trying to expand its territory.

Imagine writing a CLI tool for your company in the language your team already knows, but distributing it as a single binary. Imagine building an IoT device using microphp on a $2 microcontroller, using the same syntax you use for your Laravel backend.

This is the "Universal PHP" vision.

Join Me

I have built the primitives: the compilers, the runtimes, the vector stores, and the build system. But an ecosystem is built by a community.

I invite you to try out php-universe. Break things. Build weird things. Let’s prove that PHP is not just a scripting language for the web—it is a systems language for the future.

You can find all the individual projects on my GitHub. Let’s build something amazing.