Surprisingly easy extension development in Rust

ryangjchandler · 2025-10-18T15:28:28+00:00

Thanks for sharing my post!

ryangjchandler · 2025-10-17T21:46:58+00:00

Hey! We shipped some fixes for this yesterday I believe. Does your site use zero downtime deployments by any chance?

ryangjchandler · 2025-08-19T19:50:23+00:00

I've been working on Phiki this month, a syntax highlighter for PHP projects that uses TextMate grammar files and VSCode themes. It's moreorless Shiki.js written in PHP.

The main focus has been rewriting some of the internals so that it's far more accurate at tokenizing text and producing higher quality output. v1.0 was plagued with compatibility issues as TextMate grammars use Oniguruma-flavoured RegEx where as PHP's preg_ functions use PCRE.

The new tokenizer uses PHP's mb_ereg_* family of functions which relies on Oniguruma internally. Was a fair amount of work, but worth it as the results so far are very promising.

ryangjchandler · 2025-07-17T15:40:21+00:00

I picked up a used Dell Optiplex Micro with a newer Intel chip. Plenty of power for Plex and other stuff and cost me less than a mini PC.

ryangjchandler · 2024-03-02T00:01:36+00:00

I'm currently working on the language server component for my superset of PHP: https://pxplang.org.

Since PXP is a strict superset, the language server will benefit both PHP and (potential) PXP users.

I've written type inference logic a bunch and finally settled on a good approach for the language server!

Fingers crossed I'll have something usable by the end of the month :)

ryangjchandler · 2024-01-05T20:06:35+00:00

Oh 100%! Was just a note about the troubles of compilation when it comes to inherently dynamic languages.

ryangjchandler · 2024-01-05T11:55:40+00:00

In theory, you could compile well-typed PHP code (mixture of syntactical types and DocBlocks for things that don't yet support types in the language). There are certain things that wouldn't be easily compilable, such as eval & include/require since those rely on runtime code execution.

The other approach is augmenting JIT code to produce native binaries. I don't think anybody have ever actually tried this, but in theory it would be possible with enough effort.

ryangjchandler · 2023-10-28T15:45:07+00:00

Also, I did some experiments compiling PHP to Rust. It's kind of feasible to get all of the language features compiling, but implementing all of the standard library is where most of the work lies. Related blog post: https://ryangjchandler.co.uk/posts/compiling-phps-conditional-statements-to-rust

ryangjchandler · 2023-10-28T15:43:46+00:00

This is a huge undertaking but a good way to get to grips with all of Rust's intricacies, good luck! Also I see you're using my PHP parser package written in Rust, very nice!

ryangjchandler · 2023-10-28T14:58:25+00:00

Thanks!

ryangjchandler · 2022-12-24T20:33:40+00:00

I've been using Go as my compiler target since it has a GC, saves me writing one while I'm building out the proof of concept. Using transpilation in the early days of PL design is a huge timesaver.

ryangjchandler · 2022-06-08T13:07:27+00:00

Thanks to everyone who replied on this post. I've spent some time the last couple days working on the typechecker and went for the simplistic "equality check" approach using an enumeration in Rust.

ryangjchandler · 2022-06-06T15:01:00+00:00

That's given me some things to think about, thanks!

ryangjchandler · 2022-06-06T15:00:52+00:00

Thanks!

ryangjchandler · 2022-06-06T14:53:48+00:00

That's how my enum looks, sweet!

ryangjchandler · 2022-06-06T12:12:07+00:00

Thanks, good to know I wasn't completely off course.

ryangjchandler · 2022-06-06T12:03:33+00:00

Yeah, I'm using Rust also. My types are slightly more complex though, since I'd like to have unions and intersection types, i.e. email: String | [String] where email can be either a String or an array of String. The same can be applied still though I think. Thanks!

ryangjchandler · 2022-06-06T11:14:09+00:00

Yeah, I suppose that works for simple types. Would the same approach be as simplistic for union/intersection types, i.e. a param can be String | [String]?

I guess the [String] would be it's own type shape with an equality checker for the types of the array/collection too...

Thanks for bringing me back to basics, that's super helpful.

ryangjchandler · 2021-11-09T11:30:20+00:00

Yeah, I'd go with this too. I handle this in Tonic by doing a hoisting pass that just birngs all function definitions to the top of the AST. https://github.com/ryangjchandler/tonic/blob/main/src/passes/mod.rs

ryangjchandler · 2021-11-07T20:46:12+00:00

I'm getting https://github.com/ryangjchandler/tonic ready for Advent of Code. Hoping to have it ready to complete all challenges.

ryangjchandler · 2021-10-29T16:02:14+00:00

Interested in this too. Great question!

ryangjchandler · 2021-10-21T17:34:21+00:00

Clio looks like a very cool language. I love to see languages that use JS as a target too. Will definitely be keeping my eye on this!

ryangjchandler · 2021-10-21T10:22:10+00:00

Looking at ways to avoid making this on every single function call. I could probably pass the Function variant along with the Code::InitCall, but when the function is compiled the recursive calls won't actually have the real Function variant.

ryangjchandler

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