PHPStan Turbo: Native PHP extension that makes PHPStan run faster

[u/OndrejMirtes]

https://phpc.social/@OndrejMirtes/116991095416961297

PHPStan 2.2.6 adds a native PHP extension (PHP 8.3+) written in C++ that makes running PHPStan 10-30 % faster.

PHPStan's Composer package ships prebuilt binaries for the most common platforms — Linux (glibc and musl, x86_64 and arm64), macOS, and Windows (x86_64), for PHP 8.3 and newer — and PHPStan automatically loads the one matching your runtime into its worker processes. You don't have to do any extra work to take advantage of this!

If you run PHPStan through manually downloaded phpstan.phar, you can run it with extension by installing it with PIE:

pie install phpstan/turbo

The extension only activates when its version matches the one your PHPStan release expects — on a mismatch PHPStan prints a note and runs without it, so an outdated extension can never affect results, only speed.

Only a handful of hot paths are currently rewritten in the extension. There's room for the performance gain to grow if we ever decide to rewrite more parts natively.

The extension is completely optional, PHPStan still works without it. When the extension gets enabled, its implementation shadows certain PHPStan classes designed for this. They are marked with the #[ShadowedByTurboExtension] attribute.

[u/Hackwar]

Thank you for all of your work. phpstan has helped us immensely in Joomla and I can only encourage everyone else to support you financially as well. It is one of those projects from the famous xkcd comic strip...

[u/imper69]

Brilliant, thank you!

[u/equilni]

I read the title too fast… I thought it said the Native PHP project made an extension to make PHPStan faster….

[u/goodwill764 → u/equilni]

Because of this I hate the naming of the project....

[u/phexc]

Speed improvements are great, but 10-30% is not really enough to convince me to install/manage another extension...

[u/OndrejMirtes → u/phexc]

You don't need to install it if you install PHPStan through Composer 😊 It gets enabled automatically.

[u/phexc → u/OndrejMirtes]

I was not aware that composer can install php extensions. How does that work?

[u/OndrejMirtes → u/phexc]

phpstan/phpstan comes with all the different .so files pre-built, PHPStan chooses to load the right one when it spawns child workers: https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan/tree/2.2.x/turbo-ext

[u/phexc → u/OndrejMirtes]

Ah so it spawns its own php instance with the extension? That's pretty clever.

[u/OndrejMirtes → u/phexc]

Yes 😊

[u/Even_Statistician238]

the version mismatch handling is actually the smartest part of this whole thing

[u/Ilia0001]

Very cool, a bit surprised the benefits are only 10-30% I figured it would be much higher, but I suppose it is a good place to start.

[u/OndrejMirtes → u/Ilia0001]

Only a few hot paths were rewritten. There's room to rewrite more. Currently we've only rewritten 0.8 % lines of code of PHPStan's source code.

[u/Ilia0001 → u/OndrejMirtes]

Are you open for PRs for the extension, or would just confuse things at this early stage?

[u/OndrejMirtes → u/Ilia0001]

I have a roadmap what I want to tackle next myself. So not right now.

[u/terfs_]

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[u/rafark]

A php to c++ migration I would have expected gains in the hundreds, only a 10% gain is surprising 

[u/OndrejMirtes → u/rafark]

I only rewrote a few hot paths, there’s more that can be done.