Why Rust for PHP Embedding (Not Go)

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:40:00 -0700

Go is my primary language and has been for a long time. When I started building ePHPm a few weeks ago the obvious move was to write it in Go. ePHPm is a PHP application server. It’s one binary that embeds the real PHP interpreter (libphp, the Zend engine) and puts an HTTP server, TLS, a KV cache and a database proxy around it. A PHP app doesn’t need nginx + php-fpm + Redis to run. FrankenPHP already proved the “PHP inside a Go web server” idea works, and it works well. I wrote it in Rust anyway. This post covers the reasoning, and the part of the design that Rust made easier and the part it didn’t. It also has some numbers I should have measured before I wrote the design doc instead of after.

Cgo on Luther Monson

Why Rust for PHP Embedding (Not Go)