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> Make it a compiled language with virtual machine similar to Java. The times of recursively creating PHP-files to serve PHP-files are dated (*cough Smarty). Compilation with checks and strict typing will increase the code quality fundamentally.

So...an evolution of Hack language by FaceBook / Meta? https://hacklang.org/

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PHP already “compiles” with opcache. But it only happens eventually once a path is requested. Having a cli to explicitly pre-generate all compiled versions while doing checks would increase the predictability of your code. Maybe even wrap it as .phar to analogue to .jar for a simple arg when running php-fpm.

hacklang is too different. But yah, thats exactly what Facebook had to do to improve PHP within their stack.

Hack was the better language for so many reasons. It should have killed PHP instead of the other way around and I'm still annoyed about it.

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