PIE: The PHP’s Next Big Thing

"There are revolutions afoot that you may not even be aware of. When many like to shout that PHP is dead, many of us know that it comes from a reputation of yesteryear. That the language has evolved with such velocity in recent years that it is more than ever an extremely competitive choice, not only for the web, but also for CLI applications for example.

And yet, some features were still rather archaic until recently. PHP extensions in particular. Although an extremely powerful tool for adding functionality to the language, taking advantage of the execution speed of the C language, extensions are all too often under-utilized, or even frowned upon, due to a tedious installation process. Although Docker containers have greatly helped to “solve“ this problem, it's still more complicated than installing a package with Composer. Unless... it becomes that easy?

It's time to shine the spotlight on PIE, a tool initiated by The PHP Foundation, which promises to do just that. It's time to breathe new life into PHP extensions!"

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