Part 1 covered the plumbing. ePHPm registers ephpm_kv_* and ephpm_db_* functions that call straight into Rust. A cache read through one costs about a tenth of a microsecond instead of a loopback round trip. That’s nice and also useless on its own. Nobody is going to rewrite their WordPress object cache or their Laravel cache store around a function called ephpm_kv_set(). Applications talk to existing APIs instead:

Most of the PHP sites I’d put on ePHPm don’t need a MySQL server. A brochure WordPress, an internal Laravel tool, a preview environment that lives for an afternoon. What they do need is something that looks like MySQL, because mysqli and pdo_mysql are the only database drivers their code has ever been pointed at. I mentioned this in the ePHPm pragmatism post as a one-paragraph “because”. This is the longer version, now that WordPress 7.0 and Laravel 13 both install and…