Calling Rust From PHP Without a Socket, Part 2: Making Existing Code Use It

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:55:00 -0700

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:

Redis through phpredis or Predis
the cache through PSR-6/16 or wp_cache_*
the database through wpdb, mysqli, Eloquent or DBAL

So there’s a set of Composer packages in the ephpm org whose whole job is to sit under those APIs and route them to the native functions. This post covers what’s in them and the rule that decides when they switch on. It also covers the bugs that only showed up once real applications ran on top.

SQLite as a Production Database via Protocol Translation

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 20:40:00 -0700

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 run end to end on it.

Laravel on Luther Monson

Calling Rust From PHP Without a Socket, Part 2: Making Existing Code Use It

SQLite as a Production Database via Protocol Translation