PXP 0.0.1 Released For What Aims To Become A Superset Of PHP

The PXP project has been an interesting language effort in recent times that aims to become a superset of PHP with additional syntax options and greater run-time capabilities. PXP 0.0.1 was released yesterday as the first very early, pre-production release for this open-source project.

The PXP language strives to be a superset of PHP with an extended type system, first-party Composer integration, and a carefully crafted developer experience. We'll see in time how PXP evolves and if it manages to attract a developer following. PXP code can at least be transpiled to PHP for easier support/execution on other platforms.

Those that haven't previously heard of the PXP language can find the basic project details on PXPlang.org.

PXP was started off being written as a Rust parser but in turn the decision was made to go back and craft it in PHP itself. The PXP 0.0.1 release announcement explains:

"This releases marks the beginning of the PHP-based system for PXP. I decided to ditch the existing Rust parser in favour of one based off of nikic/PHP-Parser.

The decision to move to a PHP-backed suite of tools was a decisive one. Developing PXP in PHP, at least initially, will allow me to move at a much higher velocity than Rust would have. Not because developing with Rust is difficult but it does add another layer of usability concerns. How do we manage releases and distributing platform-specific binaries? Somebody has encountered a bug but there's zero chance of them contributing if they don't know Rust."

That announcement on GitHub also shows a basic look at the PXP syntax thus far with the lone feature implemented for v0.0.1 being multi-line short closures.