The PHP Foundation has been announced as an entity for funding the work of developing the PHP language.
For more information regarding the structure and purpose of the foundation, please check out the blog post at: jetbrains.com.
This seems to be sparked by Nikita Popov, one of the main contributers to the language, switching focus to LLVM:
Nikita is leaving JetBrains as of December 1 and will spend significantly less time on PHP. As sad as it is to see him go, we congratulate Nikita and wish him every success in his new journey!
[...] In May 2021, right after Joe Watkins published his Avoiding Busses blog post, we started discussing the idea of a PHP Foundation. It's not something new and has been floating around for a long time.
[...] We were proceeding rather leisurely, thinking that the problem was not critical. However, Nikita's decision forced us to intensify our work on the foundation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @02:46AM
Yep, that sounds exactly like precompiling and preloading for the Zend VM OPcache. [php.net] Before it was built in to the Zend engine directly, there were a number of add-on and third-party cache choices. Before the Zend engine was adopted there were other techniques that were similar that could be used for files not executed directly.