Whereby fast is "About half the speed of native PHP"
But you are completely right pointing out that there's still some room to improve, specially when compared to running PHP natively.
Right now there's some price to pay for the isolation and sandboxing, but we are working hard to reduce the gap to zero. Stay tuned for more updates on this front!
You can deploy apps on the Wasmer Edge cloud, and also host things yourself if you want to, though in the later case the setup will be non-trivial.
The latter will always be faster.
The other caveats about "edge" throughout this discussion aside, if I needed to do this, I'd try to write something in Zig or (gag) JS or something else that compiles to WASM directly rather than writing a script for an interpreter that runs under WASM.
FrankenPHP is also really good and probably a much smarter play than trying to get your code running under WebAssembly.
If you’re on PHP and need more speed in the language itself, basically every other scripting language (yes, including Node) is off the table immediately. Lateral move at best.
(All that to say, yeah, I entirely expected that the headline would lead to an article about making PHP slower)
Which is also the reason why a lot of the PHP standard library functions are so inconsistent. They're straight wrappers around the C libraries.
Upside is, unless you have to do shit with pointer magic or play around the edges of signed/unsigned numbers, it's fairly easy to port C example code for any of the myriad things PHP has bindings to to PHP.