I initially thought this was a PHP implementation in Rust.... but it's not
Will Mago implement a PHP runtime?
Absolutely not. The PHP runtime is incredibly complex. Major efforts by large companies (e.g., Facebook's HHVM, VK's KPHP) have struggled to reach full parity with Zend Engine. Achieving this as a smaller project is infeasible and would lead to community fragmentation. We are focused on tooling, not runtimes.
https://www.peachpie.io compiles PHP to .NET.
Isn't this more transpiling than compiling?
Not really? .NET has a "Common Language Runtime", which you can think of as analogous to the Java VM or to Beam.
A transpiler might read PHP and spit out C, or Java or some other existing programming language, spitting out the code for a virtual machine doesn't make you a transpiler unless you're going to argue that all compilers are just transpilers, it's like one of those "Actually goats are fish" arguments. OK, but now the word "fish" is useless so why go to this bother ?
> The PHP runtime is incredibly complex
Say this to the team behind Ladybird browser: https://awesomekling.substack.com/p/how-were-building-a-brow...
They have the benefit of a project leader with many years of browser implementation experience AND much lower performance goals.
(Items 5 and 3 on the list in the linked page.)
80/20, also they're not implementing JIT and such because of complexity.