For nearly thirty years, writing PHP has meant writing for an interpreter. When that one Symfony endpoint that won't go faster becomes performance-critical, you reach for a C extension or a rewrite in Go or Rust and leave PHP behind.

Elephc does the opposite. Written in Rust, it compiles a static subset of PHP straight to native machine code: no Zend engine, no fallback interpreter. Your project stays in PHP, only the critical modules go through Elephc.

It's the same wall that stalled a recent generics RFC: monomorphization is free in Rust but too costly in a dynamic engine like PHP. As always, the interpreter is the constraint, not the language.

After a tour of the tool, I'll take you from an everyday example to a Doom-style demo, limitations included. You'll leave with a clear mental model of AOT compilation.