Frameworks like Laravel and Symfony gives us a huge amount of flexibility through their service container and drivers system. Sometimes, PHP itself becomes the bottleneck. In this talk, we?ll go one layer deeper: writing a custom PHP extension with FrankenPHP and Go, without any C code, before plugging it directly into Laravel as if it were a native feature.

Let's see how we can implement an in-memory LRU cache as a PHP extension, then expose it to Laravel and Symfony through a custom cache driver. Step by step, we'll explore how to extend the caching system with our high-performance extension.

Expect to see real code and real internals! Even if you never wrote a PHP extension yourself, you?ll walk away with a deeper understanding of both Laravel?s and Symfony's flexibility, as well as PHP?s core runtime, without prior knowledge in C. It opens endless possibilities to blow-up your apps performances!

Comments

Please login to leave a comment

I'm continually impressed by all of the cool things that people are able to do with PHP, and this was a great, deep dive into both FrankenPHP and writing extensions with Go.

Paul Conroy at 20:38 on 20 May 2026

This was a very interesting talk, Alex is a really clear and engaging presenter. The potential of bringing Go extensions into PHP is exciting, and this talk gives a really clear example of how to get started - lots to start playing with!

I'm amazed at what FrankenPHP can do, and I kinda want to write a battlesnake extension after this, plus the tournament last night. Thank you so much for the talk.

I really need to dig into FrankenPHP more. It's clear to me that we need to move the ecosystem to it and move away from FPM. So exciting!

Also yay, don't have to write C!