pext.dev @PextDev

Leaving PHP, Part 8: the tooling exists, but it is not the default experience pext.dev/blog/leaving-p…

Leaving PHP, Part 7: the shared-hosting mental model still leaks into the language pext.dev/blog/leaving-p…

CONVERT CODEIGNITER 4 APPS TO TYPESCRIPT CodeIgniter 4 joins the roadmap: password, hash, sessions, MySQL, and an opensourcepos POC Pext now tracks a second framework. CodeIgniter 4 has been added as a side roadmap running in parallel with Laravel, on the roadmap page. The motivation is partly diversification (CI4's dependency footprint is famously smaller, and its testing stack stresses a different mix of language features), and partly to give Pext an end-to-end target it can boot and click through, not just a unit-test pass rate. @CodeIgniter @opensourcepos pext.dev/blog/codeignit…

Leaving PHP, Part 6: async, concurrency, and streaming are still awkward The language has the pieces. Fibers landed in 8.1 and gave the runtime a primitive that any cooperative scheduler can suspend and resume. Generators have been around since 5.5 and cover a lot of streaming patterns without needing fibers at all. Swoole ships a coroutine runtime that competes on raw throughput with Node and Go for I/O-bound workloads. ReactPHP and AmPHP offer event loops, async clients, and promise-style APIs that mirror the Node design closely. pext.dev/blog/leaving-p… @nodejs

Leaving PHP, Part 5: frontend-backend type sharing is a different sport now It looks at the seam between the backend and the frontend, and the productivity gap that opens when those two halves of your application cannot share a type system. pext.dev/blog/leaving-p… @JavaScript @typescript @php @OpenAI

Back from summer break! Transpiling @processwire into TypeScript, coloring it async/await and deploying to @Cloudflare. Half way there!

@The_HappyPath @tanujDE3180 This works iff the sorting is on id. If you implement multi-column sorting, how do you handle it with B? What if sorting is on a non-unique or non-mandatory column?

@enunomaduro cascade deletes are atomic. clearing a child table and then deleting the parent row can fail if another transaction commits in the meantime. you would have to retry or lock before hand and basically do the job of the db server-side.

@ibocodes We converted OpenSourcePOS (from PHP CI4) to TypeScript and deploying it to Cloudflare was exactly the right thing to do. Sessions to KV, DB to D1.

Pext Cluster is the latest tool in the Pext runtime, and it does the same job php-fpm does in a PHP deployment: sit behind a web server, accept FastCGI-encoded requests, and hand them off to a pool of worker processes that run application code. The point of the exercise is to slot Pext Cluster in wherever php-fpm used to sit, with Apache (or Nginx) configuration and .htaccessfiles completely unchanged. Same protocol on the socket, same process model behind it, same operational shape. pext.dev/blog/pext-clus…

Managed to run an E2E REST smoke testing scenario of a PHP application converted to JS using @bunjavascript . This is a breakthrough in pext as it allows PHP developers to run their code-base in Bun using transpilation.

Part 4 looks one layer up, at the packages on top. The standard objection to leaving php at this layer goes: "Composer is fine, @packagist works, @laravelphp and @symfony have mature ecosystems, what is the actual problem?" None of those things are the problem. The problem is the gravity around them. pext.dev/blog/leaving-p…

~12 years of proposals since 2014, and the version currently failing the vote is erased generics - literally the model TypeScript shipped in 2013 and built half the JS ecosystem on. Meanwhile every Laravel/Doctrine/Symfony codebase already writes generics in @template docblocks. 200k+ files on GitHub. Types living in comments because the engine won’t take them. TypeScript has had real generic syntax for over a decade. At some point “holding out for reified generics we’ve spent 10 years proving we can’t build” stops being a roadmap. The way out of PHP has been TypeScript for a while. The tooling to actually get there is catching up.

Pext now tracks a second framework. CodeIgniter 4 has been added as a side roadmap running in parallel with Laravel, on the roadmap page. The motivation is partly diversification (CI4's dependency footprint is famously smaller, and its testing stack stresses a different mix of language features), and partly to give Pext an end-to-end target it can boot and click through, not just a unit-test pass rate. pext.dev/blog/codeignit…

Our conversion pipeline produces correct JavaScript. Some of that JavaScript is not idiomatic JavaScript, because the PHP it came from was leaning on language features (the tokenizer extension, magic methods, reflection used for caller introspection) that have no JS-native equivalent. pext-vanillify is a post-processing pass that takes the converted output and rewrites specific patterns into something a JS engineer would have written by hand. It uses an LLM, it runs after the deterministic pipeline, and it logs every change it makes. pext.dev/blog/pext-vani…

@matteocollina shipping on the same topic (php to node). nice to see popularity in rewriting stuff prom one language to another :)

Leaving PHP, Part 3: the type system arrived late and incomplete pext.dev/blog/leaving-p…

Transpiling dragonmantank/cron-expression from PHP to JS: timezones, DST, PHP date formats, and a cache for Intl.DateTimeFormat pext.dev/blog/cron-expr…