🐘 TypeScript for PHP? YES, that's possible! And it's not what you think...
It is time to bring opposites together, to stir up these stagnant waters, and to restore an industry that is dynamic from within, with multiple connections that were previously impossible or unimaginable. In the previous parts of this series, we explored how PureScript acts as a quiet rewrite of the Web , offering a territory of mathematical precision above JavaScript, and how its universal polymorphism allows it to target wildly different runtimes like Node.js, Erlang's BEAM, Chez Scheme, etc. But hey, what about the elephant in the room? Yes, what is running the majority of the web, today, in the shadow? You know. The eternal one, the big one, the one whose death everyone talks about, but who never truly dies. PHP. While the modern JavaScript ecosystem (among others) races toward edge computing and containerized microservices, around 70% of the web is still powered by PHP . From legacy WordPress sites to affordable shared hosting (cPanel, OVH, GoDaddy, basic LAMP stacks), a massive portion of the internet lives in environments where escaping the PHP runtime is either financially unviable, technically impossible, or simply unnecessary. And yet... For a long time, the PHP ecosystem has been left without a true, strictly typed functional and safe alternative, like TypeScript for Javascript. Even though recent PHP versions introduced fantastic features (short closures, match expressions, Fibers), the frustration that comes with its historical limitations and dynamic typing remains very real for some of its users. Very well! This is why I built phpurs : a brand new compiler backend that transpiles PureScript directly to modern PHP 8.4+ syntax. It is no longer a proof of concept. It is passing the official PureScript test suite , and it is ready for production. Here is how we bring the elegance of purely functional programming to the big web, while keeping deployment as simple as a legacy FTP upload, or anything alike. The easy deployment paradox In modern DevOps, deplo