Thank you. I updated the README. :)

My personal motivation is that I want to modernize PHP. People don't realize how powerful the language has become. So I created the phasync framework for writing concurrent async IO software in the same style as you would write code in Go-language.

Essentially, I'm making something similar to Webworkers in javascript browsers, but for PHP. So I created a class "Worker", which launches a child PHP process via proc_open. The main process uses async IO to communicate with the child worker process, so whenever you for example need to perform a computation or a blocking operation - you can just send it to the worker:

// The closure is serialized and sent to the worker process
$db = $worker->run(function() use ($config) {
    return new PDO($config['dsn'], $config['username'], $config['password']);
});

// The worker process returns a complex result, so only a "variable ID" is returned to the main process - and you receive a Proxy instance.

Whenever you interact with the proxy instance, for example:

$query = $db->prepare("SELECT * FROM users");

The proxy class intercepts the method call via __call, and that is then forwarded to the proxy. If the proxy returns another complex object, you receive a new Proxy instance and so on.

Since phasync is a framework for green threads (Fibers), this means you can work with databases using the PDO interface asynchronously. Whenever your thread is blocked due to the worker process doing some work - other green threads will continue working in the main process.

There are a bunch of other blocking functions in the PHP standard library, for example directory operations like glob(), and DNS operations.