PHP turned 30 in 2025. With The PHP Foundation's support, the PHP project marked the year by shipping PHP 8.5. The PHP Foundation also launched PIE 1.0, initiated a project to modernize PHP's stream layer, and authored roughly 42% of all commits to PHP's core. This work was supported by 536 sponsors and individual contributors, and it could not have happened without them.

At the end of 2025, The PHP Foundation consisted of 8 volunteer board members, an Executive Director sponsored by JetBrains, and 11 contracted developers who worked part- and full-time to strengthen and improve the core PHP language through bug and security fixes, feature development, and contributing to the RFC process through discussion and development of new RFCs.

The total contributions received from sponsors and individual donors was $730,534, which enabled The PHP Foundation to advance its mission in a meaningful way.

About the PHP Foundation

The PHP Foundation's main focus is to ensure the sustainability and long term viability of the PHP language. Our priorities continue to be:

• Improving the language for users
• Providing high-quality maintenance
• Improving the project to retain current contributors and integrate new ones
• Promoting the public image of PHP

It should be noted that The PHP Foundation does not control the decisions made by the PHP community regarding the language, nor does it assume any governance over the language itself. PHP has always been, and will continue to be a community-owned Open Source project.

What we shipped in 2025

Leadership at The PHP Foundation coordinated several high-level initiatives, including:

• The completion of a Security Audit by Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF), funded by the Sovereign Tech Agency through the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), and sustained security advisory work across the team
• The addition of FrankenPHP to the PHP GitHub organization, in collaboration with Les-Tilleuls.coop
• The development of the official PHP SDK for MCP, in collaboration with the Symfony Team and Anthropic

In addition, in 2025, eleven Foundation-funded contractors collectively logged thousands of hours advancing PHP's language, runtime, security posture, ecosystem tooling, and community reach.

Key achievements included:

• Successful delivery of PHP 8.5
• Launch of PIE 1.0 and initiation of the formal PECL deprecation process
• Launch of the STF Streams modernization project
• PHP Foundation representation at the Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group on the EU Cyber Resilience Act

The PHP Foundation Staff

Our 2025 team was stable and productive, and worked very well together. We ended 2025 by adding one more contractor to the team in H2: Joe Watkins.

Therefore, as of January 1, 2026, 11 Foundation developers work on PHP:

• Arnaud Le Blanc @arnaud-lb
• David Carlier @devnexen
• Derick Rethans @derickr
• Gina P. Banyard @Girgias
• Ilija Tovilo @iluuu1994
• Jakub Zelenka @bukka
• James Titcumb @asgrim
• Joe Watkins @krakjoe
• Máté Kocsis @kocsismate
• Saki Takamachi @SakiTakamachi
• Shivam Mathur @shivammathur

Team Achievements

We acknowledge the limitations in providing any metrics; very rarely do metrics accurately represent the full scenario (for instance, a 1-line commit and a 100-line commit are counted equally in the overall number of commits). Additionally, some metrics are more difficult to capture than others. Therefore, we offer this set of obtainable metrics to collectively demonstrate the team's impact. To clarify the data points above:

• PRs merged = PRs that were authored by a contractor that were merged by anyone
• Community PR Reviews = PRs from other people that were reviewed/commented on by contractors
• % of Bug Fixes = the percent of all bug fix PRs that were authored by a contractor but merged by anyone in the community. PRs were considered “fixes” if they included the words “fix,” “resolve,” or “bug” in the title of the PR

Language & runtime

• URL/URI parsing RFC (Máté Kocsis) passed in May, representing PHP's most significant standard-library addition in years, including upstream contributions to the uriparser C library.
• Gina P. Banyard drove the entire PHP 8.5 deprecations and warnings RFC to php-src and authored 173 merged PRs (roughly 16% of all merged PRs to php-src in 2025).
• Arnaud Le Blanc's Tail Call VM technique merged in August, removing PHP's dependency on a single compiler for peak performance; he also co-developed Partial Function Applications v2 and Context Managers with Larry Garfield.
• Ilija Tovilo was the team's leading committer to php-src (565 commits) and advanced the Pattern Matching RFC alongside deep performance work on zend_op size and TMP|VAR consolidation.
• Saki Takamachi delivered BCMath optimizations and created xsse, a portable SIMD abstraction library already in use in php-src.
• Jakub Zelenka progressed with implementation of JsonSchema support for the JSON extension.

Security

Jakub Zelenka led sustained multi-month investigations on multiple security advisories, which included the handling of PHP security releases. Jakub also represented the PHP Foundation in the Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group shaping EU Cyber Resilience Act compliance. David Carlier delivered a steady stream of overflow, double-free, and memory leak fixes across GD, ZIP, intl, PDO_SQLite, sodium, and Fiber, upstreaming several directly to libgd. Shivam Mathur is responsible for security upgrades to Windows PHP builds addressing 50+ CVEs/security issues, and continues to support builds for 100+ extensions for Windows. Derick Rethans patched an XSS in php.net and ran an emergency CVE response for the rsync server.

Streams modernization (Sovereign Tech Fund)

The STF underwrote a 530-hour modernization of PHP's stream layer, delivering a new Polling API, TLS 1.3 improvements with session resumption (PSK, tickets, early data), redesigned stream error handling, an io_uring/IOCP abstraction, modernized copy infrastructure (copy_file_range, splice, sendfile), filter seeking improvements, and socket option enhancements. This is an ongoing project and will see more progress in 2026.

Ecosystem & infrastructure

The PHP Foundation has demonstrated meaningful contributions in several areas:

• PIE (the new PHP extension installer): James Titcumb authored 482 of 537 commits to php/pie (roughly 90% of the codebase) and 109 of 156 merged PRs. He shipped 14 PIE releases including 1.0 in June, formally initiated PECL's deprecation, and delivered five conference talks evangelizing the project.
• Windows infrastructure: Shivam Mathur authored 95% of commits to php/php-windows-builder and 98% of commits to php/web-downloads. Without his work, PHP would have no Windows distribution maintainer.
• French documentation: 38% of commits and 47% of merged PRs to php/doc-fr in 2025 came from David Carlier, a community-facing impact that is often invisible in English-language reporting but reaches Francophone PHP developers worldwide.
• Infrastructure: Derick Rethans migrated nearly every php.net property (wiki, downloads, qa, pecl, bugs, docs, www, and more) to modern Ansible-managed infrastructure, expanded WebAssembly support for interactive examples in the manual, and contributed alongside Shivam and Roman on the redesigned downloads page. Máté Kocsis and Ilija built statistical benchmarking infrastructure (Welch T-Test, Wilcoxon, Valgrind, variance reduction) underpinning the team's performance work.

Strategic R&D

Joe Watkins joined in H2 and published ORT, a PHP tensor library with backends for SSE2/SSE4.1/AVX2/AVX512, NEON, CUDA, RISC-V64, and WebAssembly (including a custom IEEE 754-2008 float16 implementation in C) reaching 97% test coverage and positioning PHP to participate in AI/ML workloads. Arnaud explored generational and Boehm GC, plus Modules and Snapshots PoCs.

Maintenance & stewardship

Beyond headline projects, the team spent a large percentage of their time carrying PHP's day-to-day weight: continuous bug triage (Ilija's largest recurring line item every month), monthly release management across 8.3.x and 8.4.x, cross-platform fixes spanning Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Haiku, French (David) and Japanese (Saki) documentation contributions, mailing list moderation, and dozens of code reviews monthly across virtually every PHP subsystem. Additionally, the team spent time on maintenance and stable releases of external extensions including imagick and GnuPG, and tools like PHP-FPM that are part of PHP core.

RFCs

The following list covers RFCs authored or co-authored by PHP Foundation contractors in 2025, along with their RFCs that changed status in 2025.

*This person was not a contractor for The PHP Foundation at time of authorship, but is acknowledged here for their contribution to the RFC

The PHP Foundation Sponsors

Our sponsors and individual contributors are the lifeblood of The PHP Foundation, for without their continued support, we would not be able to continue making meaningful contributions and improvements to the PHP language.

Our highest level sponsors for 2025 were Sovereign Tech Agency, JetBrains, Automattic, GoDaddy.com, Passbolt, Sentry, Les-Tilleuls.coop, Craft CMS, Private Packagist, Cybozu, Tideways, Manychat, Zend by Perforce, CH Studio, and Aternos GmbH.

Overall, 536 organizations and individuals sponsored The PHP Foundation in 2025, which is substantially less than the previous year. This is an indication of an increasingly challenging fundraising space in the open source ecosystem, a reality our peers at other Foundations and Open Source projects are also navigating.

We are incredibly grateful for all those who have financially supported and continue to support The PHP Foundation.

The PHP Foundation Financial Report

In 2025, The PHP Foundation was financially backed by organizations and individuals with the goal of paying a competitive salary to as many core developers as possible. These numbers represent figures in USD.

*Fees include a 10% Open Source Collective fiscal host fee (dealing with contracts, expense reviews and payments, bank account management, official registrations and dealing with government requirements, open collective platform development etc), and 1-5% percent of payment processing fees, depending on the payment method used.

**Starting in 2025, some funds were donated and paid in Euro; please allow for small rounding variance due to conversion rates.

All incoming and outgoing transactions of The PHP Foundation are publicly available to view for anyone: https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation#category-BUDGET

The PHP Foundation Brand & Public Channels

The PHP Foundation represents a community of core PHP developers and advocates for the PHP programming language. The PHP Foundation used the channels listed below for public communication:

• 24.8K LinkedIn page followers: https://www.linkedin.com/company/phpfoundation
• 13.7K X followers: https://x.com/thephpf
• 1.2K Mastodon followers: https://phpc.social/@thephpf
• 1.2K Bluesky followers: https://bsky.app/profile/thephpf.bsky.social
• 3390 Subscribers to The PHP Foundation Newsletter

We will continue to grow our social media presence as a means of connecting with the broader PHP community.

Looking Back: Goals for 2025

In the previous report, we outlined a few organizational and technical goals. Let's take a look at how we did.

Organization Goals

• Secure funding to support core development and marketing initiatives. ✅

  The PHP Foundation received funds as noted above to continue our focus on core development and the marketing of PHP and The PHP Foundation.

• Launch the "PHP 30" anniversary campaign in collaboration with JetBrains. ✅

  The PHP Foundation celebrated 30 years of PHP at the PHPverse conference hosted by JetBrains.

• Consolidate and grow social media presence across multiple platforms. ✅

  The reach and engagement for our social media accounts grew in every platform.

• Increase website traffic through improved documentation and resources. ❓

  We only added tracking to the php.net website toward the end of 2024, so we did not have a baseline for comparison. This is something we can measure moving forward.

• Develop an Ambassador Program. ❌

  This was discussed, but not launched. Look for a version of this in 2026.

• Begin preparation for the "PHP Next" marketing campaign to highlight PHP's modernization. ❌

  This was discussed, but not launched. Look for a version of this in 2026.

• Modernize PHP's website with updated downloads page, documentation, and homepage. ⚠️ Partial

  This was partially completed and included a redesigned page for the 8.5 release and a clearer and more functional Downloads page. There is still work to be done on the homepage and in the documentation.

Technical Goals

• Continue on-going maintenance and development of the PHP core. ✅

  As demonstrated in this report, our contractors continue to focus on improving the PHP core.

• Establish a working group for integrating modern HTTP server capabilities into PHP core. ✅

  Instead, the PHP project incorporated the FrankenPHP project into its GitHub organization, offering a modern solution to running PHP in an HTTP server. This change was initiated by engineers at Les-Tilleuls.coop, and implemented in partnership with the PHP Foundation.

• Address key developer experience pain points, particularly for first-time users. ⚠️ Partial

  This was partially completed with the improvements on the Downloads page, but there is still much work and research to be done here.

Looking Ahead: Goals for 2026

2026 brings its own challenges but we are committed to continuing to make a measurable difference in the PHP language and ecosystem.

Organization Goals

• Complete the executive transition initiated in Q4 2025
• Complete the onboarding of a Director of Fundraising
• Expand support for the PHP Ecosystem
• Improve Foundation communication, transparency, and internal documentation
• Build a plan to improve public perception of PHP
• Balance spending with funding and creating a systematic approach to fundraising

Technical Goals

• Create Cryptography working group
• Explore support for continued security-focused work

Budget plan for 2026

Total expenses exceeded total received donations by approximately $139,000 in 2025, which was a deliberate choice to maintain investment in technical headcount while we strengthen relationships with sponsors and individual contributors. The PHP Foundation remains financially solvent with healthy reserves, and reducing this gap is a 2026 priority.

We will also continue to utilize Open Collective as our fiscal host, as they provide transparency and a suite of valuable financial services for The PHP Foundation.

Outro

The work in this report is the runway for what's next. We head into 2026 with real momentum and a clear sense of what the community has asked of us. None of the technical leadership, the security work, the new partnerships ahead, and the support for the PHP ecosystem happens without the people who fund us. With your help, together we can keep PHP thriving in a changing open source world.

In March, the Linux Foundation announced a grant with the goal of strengthening the security of the open source software ecosystem. This funding is managed by Alpha-Omega and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF).

We're delighted to announce the PHP Foundation has been awarded a grant from Alpha-Omega to help improve the security of the PHP open source ecosystem.

PHP is foundational to the modern web, and ensuring its security is essential for a significant portion of the web's functionality and integrity.

New security tools making use of AI are accelerating the discovery of vulnerabilities in open source software. Initiatives like Project Glasswing are attempting to prepare software for the increasing accessibility of such tooling to bad actors. A number of large PHP projects have already received and acted on credible audit reports and concrete issues found by these new tools.

At the same time, many projects have been reporting a drastic increase in the volume of vulnerability reports they have to deal with, many bearing the hallmarks of lazy AI generation. These low-quality reports waste maintainers' time and overshadow legitimate issues.

The PHP Foundation is creating a PHP Ecosystem Security Team to help our ecosystem maintainers with these new challenges. This new PHP Foundation team will help triage vulnerability reports and disclose them responsibly as necessary. It will work on tooling to discover, classify and remediate security vulnerabilities and share emerging techniques on using them effectively and help the PHP ecosystem adopt these tools. The team will respect maintainer bandwidth, provide high-quality reports, coordinate project access to new security tooling, support projects with only a few maintainers, and find solutions for projects with no active maintainers at all.

We're excited our friends at the Drupal Association were awarded a similar grant from Alpha-Omega to secure the Drupal ecosystem built on top of PHP. The PHP Foundation is looking forward to collaborating with the Drupal Security Team on shared approaches and we hope to be joined by more experts from individual PHP projects and subcommunities as we build out the new team.

The PHP Foundation grant will fund a six-month full-time position titled "Ecosystem AI Security Engineer in Residence at the PHP Foundation" to lead this effort and to prepare a sustainability plan for the time after this initial phase. This person will act as a trusted intermediary between security researchers and maintainers in urgent, high-risk situations, and will collaborate with peers in similar roles across other language ecosystems. Additionally, grant funding will also be employed toward the team goals described above where they cannot be accomplished by the single paid lead position or with the help of PHP community volunteers.

After many conversations with community leaders in the PHP ecosystem, known security experts and Foundation stakeholders, the PHP Foundation board voted unanimously to offer the position to Volker Dusch (@edorian). We asked Volker to introduce himself.

Meet Volker

👋,

Some of you may know me as one of the PHP 8.5 Release Managers, or might have met me at one of more than 100 PHP-related conferences I've visited or spoken at in the last 20 years.

PHP has been the main programming language of my professional career, from helping maintain PHPUnit for a couple of years and more recently, working on various language RFCs.

In the past, I've worked on a high-traffic social networking site, remote monitoring of solar plants and software for medical trials. Currently, I'm working on PHP performance and monitoring tooling at Tideways, which I'm grateful to for allowing me to take some time off to focus on this new challenge.

Interested in hearing from me? Got feedback?

My goal is to be open and communicate early about how the Ecosystem Security Team is taking shape while making the most of the resources we have.

Big projects and foundational libraries are on my radar for security analysis already, and I'm especially keen to hear from people who want to actively collaborate and have the bandwidth to do so.

So if you want to put your project forward or have questions or comments for me, I'd love to hear from you!

Get in touch via email: volker@thephp.foundation.

You can also find me on Mastodon and LinkedIn.

Our goal is to capture perspectives from across the PHP community – we want as many voices as possible to be included. To make that happen, we’re starting by collecting suggestions for survey questions.

This week, you can submit your proposed questions and upvote others through a dedicated form. We’ll review all submissions and select the most interesting ones to include in the survey, which will launch in June. If you have an idea for a question, you can submit your question here.

The submissions are open until April 28, 2026. We look forward to hearing from you!

Part 1: Feedback from the Community

Oh my friends, we have so much to talk about.

I’ve been with The PHP Foundation for a few weeks, and many people have asked me about my vision, goals, and strategy for the upcoming year. In my opinion, The PHP Foundation’s stated mission of ensuring the long-term prosperity of the PHP language can be interpreted many different ways. So what exactly does this mean in terms of actionable efforts that will impact the community in the ways that align with this mission?

To answer that question, my goal was simple: listen to people who have a vested interest in the success of PHP and see what themes emerge. So I opened my calendar, messages, and email, and you all answered the call.

So far, I have connected with around 60 people from 18 countries. I’ve heard from PHP community members, people working in the ecosystem, maintainers of PHP projects, consultants, sponsors, core developers, leaders of other open source foundations, user group organizers, and of course, our own Foundation staff and Board members. I am thrilled that you all had a lot to say, because as I’ve said before, apathy is a much harder problem to tackle.

Before I share the findings, It is important to note a few things:

• Even though people identified many issues that could be better, there is still much love for PHP and the community.
• Some of the issues brought to me are not within the scope of The PHP Foundation’s authority. That being said, there are places where we can offer our support.
• These findings represent the concerns that were brought to me, and they aren’t presented as “fact” or official opinions of The PHP Foundation.
• Some of the findings may be of no surprise to you. And some of them may not resonate with you personally. I’d just ask that you keep in mind that the feedback is honestly presented as it was shared, and that these are also valid experiences from others.

High Level Summary of Findings

Overall, these were the biggest takeaways:

• PHP’s biggest challenges are perception, coordination, and onboarding, not technical capability
• The community loves the language and would choose PHP over other options, despite the challenges
• The ecosystem is large but fragmented
• The newcomer experience, education, and talent pipeline have room for improvement
• The PHP Foundation’s role and impact is not well understood
• Funding is a shared challenge across open source
• AI brings much uncertainty and many polarizing opinions, so agreeing upon a unified approach will be very challenging

I've classified the feedback I received into four primary buckets:

I created this slide presentation to share and summarize the feedback I received. You can also view it on GitHub as a PDF or in Markdown. I encourage you to take a look.

What’s Next?

In a follow up blog post (Part 2), I will be sharing The PHP Foundation’s strategies that aim to address some of these issues. And as always, please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have input or feedback to share. You can reach me via email or you can schedule some 1:1 time with me on my calendar.

Please join us in welcoming Matt to the Foundation Board!

A little about me

PHP was my introduction to open source, when PHP 3 was the latest release. It was mind blowing to see an amazing group of smart, funny people collaborate with each other, help newbies, and build impactful things together while still having fun. People who lived thousands of miles away from each other and who had never met each other. People who had completely different backgrounds and daily lives. People who spoke different languages and lived in different time zones. They all managed to find a way to come together as a community. They wrote code, they organized events, they started local user groups, they built projects together, and they helped each other learn. Forgive my sentimentality, but it was (and still is) magical.

It was this sense of community that fascinated me most, and I found myself moving from PHP development to open source community management. Since officially making that switch in 2010, I’ve worked for companies like GitHub, Sourceforge, and Pivotal, striving to make open source healthier, more inclusive, and better for everyone. I wanted anyone with an interest to be able to join the open source party, bring their unique set of skills, and experience the magic firsthand.

For the last 6 years, I have worked as the Community Manager for an open source project called CHAOSS which focuses on open source community health and sustainability. It has been an unforgettable experience, I’m very proud of what we all accomplished together, and I love that community very much. But as I find my career pivoting back toward PHP, it honestly feels like coming home again.

Looking to the future

The progress that has been made by the Foundation in the last few years is remarkable! Moving forward, you can expect to see the same kind of commitment to improving the PHP language and to keeping PHP relevant and sustainable.

In addition, we aim to increase the Foundation’s transparency and openness, and to strengthen our collaborative relationships with users, sponsors, contributors, organizations, and the PHP community at large. A solid and thriving PHP ecosystem belongs to and benefits us all, but none of us can make that happen alone.

Let’s chat!

Because we’re all in this together, I want to spend the next 1-2 months really listening to what you have to say. I have an open calendar and I encourage you to reserve some time with me. I want to hear from PHP developers, contributors, companies using PHP, independent consultants, sponsors, community members, and anyone else interested in the future of PHP. I want to hear about your goals, your motivations, your pain points, and yes, even your wacky and unorthodox ideas. And if meetings aren’t your thing, that’s completely understandable. You can also send me an email. (I’ll even check my inbox!)

PHP’s secret recipe has always been its community and I can’t wait to be collaborating with you all again!

Elizabeth brings a rare combination of deep roots in the PHP community and proven leadership in open-source governance. She co-founded a volunteer-based nonprofit dedicated to supporting women and non-binary individuals in the PHP industry, served as Community Manager at GitHub where she led developer outreach programs including the Patchwork initiative, and has been active in CHAOSS – a project focused on open-source community health metrics.

Her experience spanning community building, fundraising, outreach operations, and open-source strategy makes her a natural fit to lead the foundation into its next chapter.

As previously announced, founding Executive Director Roman Pronskiy is transitioning to focus on his growing role at JetBrains, while continuing to serve on the Board of Directors. Roman will work closely with Elizabeth to ensure a smooth handover.

Please join us in welcoming Elizabeth. We're looking forward to what's ahead. 🐘💜

team.blue is a leading AI-powered digital enabler serving small and medium businesses (SMBs) and agencies across Europe. With more than 4,000 experts, 3.3 million customers, and operations in over 22 countries, team.blue provides businesses with the digital tools they need to build, grow, and scale online. Its ecosystem spans domains, hosting, cloud solutions, website and e-commerce tools, and a fast-growing portfolio of AI-driven SaaS products. For team.blue, PHP represents a foundational technology across its platforms and services.

PHP: the engine behind team.blue's platforms

PHP's performance, stability, and extensive ecosystem also provide a scalable basis for delivering AI-powered capabilities and intelligent user journeys, enabling million SMBs to grow and succeed online. PHP underpins:

• Shared hosting and managed WordPress products at brands like Combell, Register.it, and TransIP.

• PHP-based SaaS products (core app logic, integrations, and day-to-day feature work).

• Internal tools and systems used across the group.

PHP's mature ecosystem and proven scalability allow team.blue to build sophisticated digital tools that help SMBs and agencies grow online, demonstrating how the language powers modern high-traffic platforms across diverse use cases.

Discover more about the team.blue ecosystem: https://team.blue/our-ecosystem/

Giving back to the PHP community

As a Gold Sponsor, team.blue is putting tangible support behind PHP, helping accelerate progress, maintain strong security, and back the ecosystem globally, while directly supporting the essential work of maintenance, continuous improvement, and ensuring the language remains ready for what comes next.

Learn more about team.blue and its mission to make online business success simpler: https://team.blue/

The gist

In PHP 8.6, it will be possible to create a closure that simply delegates to another function without writing out the whole closure.

// This
$underscore = str_replace(' ', '_', ?);

// Is effectively the same as this:
$underscore = fn(string $s): string => str_replace(' ' , '_', $s);

Both lines will produce nearly identical opcodes, but the former is much easier to both write and to read, as it doesn't require messing about with redeclaring all the types and variable names.

Any function (or method) call may use one of two placeholders, ? or ..., to indicate that it is only "partially invoking" that function. Or "partially applying arguments to it." It works with both positional and named arguments, too!

function complex(int $a, int $b, int $c, int $d): string { ... }

// This creates a closure that takes 2 ints and returns a string.
$f = complex(?, 2, ?, 4);

// This creates the same closure, but with named arguments.
$f = complex(b: 2, d: 4, ...);

// This reverses the order of the parameters, $f needs $c first, then $a.
$f = complex(b: 2, d: 4, c: ?, a: ?);

// Keep all arguments unbound. Hey look, first-class-callables!
$f = complex(...);

// This creates a zero argument closure, which just calls complex() when invoked!
$f = complex(1, 2, 3, 4, ...);

PFA supports a wide variety of complex use cases and features, like parameter reordering, named arguments, variadics, etc. In practice, however, we expect most uses to be reducing a function down to a single remaining argument (that is, currying). That makes it perfect to use as a callback. Most of PHP's functions that take callbacks expect a single argument, and the few remaining take two (such as a value and a key). PFA makes using arbitrarily complex, contextually aware functions in those cases trivially easy.

// This
$result = array_map(in_array(?, $legal, strict: true), $input);

// is much nicer than this
$result = array_map(fn(string $s): bool => in_array($s, $legal, strict: true), $input);

By design, it's also the perfect complement for the new pipe operator. To reuse some examples from the Pipe RFC:

$numberOfAdmins = getUsers()
    |> array_filter(?, isAdmin(...))
    |> count(...);

$result = "Hello World"
    |> htmlentities(...)
    |> str_split(...)
    |> array_map(strtoupper(...), ?)
    |> array_filter(?, fn($v) => $v != 'O')
;

What's more, optimizations around the pipe operator mean the closure doesn't even need to be created in those cases, so there's zero performance overhead.

The RFC has more details on all the ins and outs of the new syntax.

The long view

If all of this sounds a lot like an extended version of "first class callables," it should. Or rather, "first class callables," are the training wheels version of partial function application.

PFA was first proposed way back in 2021, by a team of Joe Watkins, Levi Morrison, Paul Crovella, and myself. That version was largely similar on the surface, but had a different implementation that caused some consternation. In particular, Nikita Popov (at the time still PHP's de facto lead developer) felt that it introduced too much complexity in the engine. His hesitancy convinced many others to reject it at the time, though there was still a lot of interest and support.

There was enough support, however, that Nikita asked "couldn't we just do foo(...) to delay all the variables, and skip the rest of the RFC?" The result of that was the First Class Callables RFC, released in PHP 8.1.

I've been looking to take a second swing at PFA since then, but needed the right time and right collaborators. FCC has clearly shown itself to be a huge boon to the language, so why not go all the way? It wasn't until the Pipes RFC passed earlier this year, though, that I was able to snare the PHP Foundation's Arnaud Le Blanc into working on a second version with me. It didn't quite make it into PHP 8.5 for timing reasons, but it's now available in 8.6.

So what changed? One, FCC ended up already including a lot of the underlying engine trickery that was needed for this version of PFA. We were able to leverage that. For another, the implementation is a bit different. Rather than creating a special kind of pseudo-closure that can be extra-optimized, the new approach just creates a normal closure object like we've had for years. That makes it much simpler to implement and solve a ton of edge-case questions. Three, now we have pipes.

And oh boy is this an exciting combination.

A long time coming

PFA for PHP really began even before 2021. As discussed in the Pipes blog post from July, way back in 2016 Sara Golemon proposed porting Hack/HHVM's pipe syntax to PHP:

$result = $arr
    |> array_column($$, 'tags')
    |> array_merge(...$$)
    |> array_unique($$)
    |> array_values($$)
;

That was never approved, but led us to try splitting the syntax in two: The pipe operator itself, and partial function application instead of $$. We tried in 2021 to get both, but both failed. Now we have both.

One of the chief criticisms I've seen about the new pipe operator is the need to wrap up multi-parameter functions into an inline arrow function, and then wrap that in () to keep the parser happy. Which is a fair criticism! And the perfect fix for that criticism is... partial function application. Which we now have. The twins have been reunited.

PHP breaks the mold

I've often seen PHP criticized for just stealing features from other languages and piling them in willy-nilly. Frankly that's not always a bad thing: PHP, much like English, evolves by finding good ideas in other languages and ahem borrowing them, and making it our own.

Partial function application is not a new concept. It's been the foundation of many functional languages for decades. Haskell, for instance, implicitly uses partial application for literally every function call. Any function call can just omit its right-most arguments and poof, it becomes a partial application.

What I have not seen in any language, however, is the ability to partially apply arbitrary parameters. That's important for PHP, because while Haskell's entire standard library was built around the assumption of right-most partial application, PHP's most definitely was not. We needed to be able to turn arbitrary functions into unary (single-argument) functions to allow most parts of the standard library to work with... pipes. Or as callbacks.

And now we can. I do not know of any other language that has as flexible, powerful, and compact a partial function application syntax as PHP 8.6 will have. Here, PHP would seem to be the innovator.

Rock on, ElePHPants!

What comes next?

There's one more major piece of the puzzle still to come: Function composition. Where pipe executes immediately, function composition creates a new function by sticking two functions end-to-end. Sara Golemon helpfully got it started, but it still needs some work before it can be formally proposed.

That would complete the trifecta of "Functional Features" we've been trying to get into PHP for years to allow a much more natural use of functional techniques.

Each of these RFCs is, on its own, useful but not earth-shattering. Taken together... "synergy" may be a dirty word outside of management consulting, but in this case it applies. We are very close to blowing open PHP's functional capabilities in much the way that PHP 5.2 finally blew open its object-oriented capabilities. And as a multi-paradigm language, we'll be able to freely mix and match OOP and FP approaches where they make the most sense.

I can't wait!

Our Achievements This Year

Now in our fourth year, The PHP Foundation has achieved several milestones that have further strengthened the PHP ecosystem:

• Release of PHP 8.5
• PIE 1.0 Release
• Supporting FrankenPHP
• PHP MCP SDK together with Anthropic and Symfony
• 2nd Sovereign Tech Agency Investment for the Stream Layer Rework

Thank You to Our Sponsors

We owe a special thanks to our major sponsors who make our work possible:

Platinum

Automattic
Sovereign Tech Agency
JetBrains

Gold

Laravel
GoDaddy

Silver

Passbolt 🆕, Private Packagist, Craft CMS, Cybozu, Tideways. Zend by Perforce. Symfony Corp, Sentry. Manychat, Mercari Inc., Les-Tilleuls.coop, pixiv Inc., Aternos GmbH, CH Studio

In total more than 550 donations were made by businesses and individual sponsors to The PHP Foundation throughout this year through OpenCollective and more through our GitHub sponsors.

Your contributions enable us to support developers, fund crucial projects, and ensure PHP is a modern and reliable choice for web development.

If you are yet to decide on sponsoring the foundation, here you can find information on how to join us and why it matters or reach out directly to contact@thephp.foundation.

Outlook into 2026

Big changes are ahead for 2026, when our founding and long-term executive director Roman Pronskiy (JetBrains) will step down and the foundation will hire a dedicated executive director for the first time.

This marks a new chapter as we recognize that The PHP Foundation has grown so much that we consider a dedicated management position to be required to ensure that our projects and goals are getting done.

If you are interested in the Executive Director role, we are still looking for candidates to apply until December 15th, 2025.

Furthermore, we’d like to add 2 new developers to our team who applied to our program in autumn.

And mainly, our team will continue to maintain, document, and improve PHP further with the next major release (8.6 or 9.0) coming at the end of 2026.

Thank you,
The PHP Foundation
🐘💜