Hi r/PHP. I'm Shiv, I make PHP videos in Hinglish on YouTube, and a lot of my viewers learn on Windows with XAMPP. The last XAMPP release for Windows I can find ships PHP 8.2, so people keep asking me how to get 8.3, 8.4 or 8.5 working locally without Docker.

So I built DevStackBox, an open-source desktop app for Windows 10/11:

• The installer includes Apache 2.4.65, PHP 8.3.31, MySQL 8.4.11 LTS and phpMyAdmin 5.2.2.
• From inside the app you can download PHP 8.1, 8.2, 8.4 or 8.5 (official windows.php.net builds, SHA-256 checked) and switch versions.
• Apache with .htaccess works the way XAMPP users expect.
• Editor for httpd.conf, my.cnf and php.ini with automatic backups, plus virtual hosts, SSL, logs and a terminal.
• Import from XAMPP copies htdocs. Your databases still need a phpMyAdmin export and import.
• MIT license, no telemetry, no account, no paid tier.

Things it does not do yet: Composer is not bundled, there is no one-click Laravel or WordPress, and it is Windows only. The installer is not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen will warn you. The SHA-256 is on the download page.

Repo: https://github.com/DevStackBox/DevStackBox Site: https://www.devstackbox.com/

Two questions for people who develop PHP on Windows:

1. What would make you switch from whatever you use now (XAMPP, Laragon, WSL, Docker)?
2. Which matters more to you next: bundled Composer, automatic project.test virtual hosts, or a portable ZIP that needs no admin rights?

Manticore is an ahead-of-time compiler for PHP 8.5+, written in PHP with an LLVM backend. It compiles itself without a PHP interpreter or other programming languages.
Link: https://github.com/manticorephp/compiler

After one more month of iterating over the compiler functionality, it has reached another milestone that is worth highlighting: the compiler can now compile Symfony apps.

Currently, this is basically a Symfony skeleton without Doctrine (in progress) or simple Symfony Console apps. It utilizes the built-in HTTP server with 15k RPS in single-worker mode (the pure server without frameworks can utilize around 70-80k RPS on small apps).

Also, the following improvements were made:

• WebSocket server and client
• Native data structures (vec, map, set, Int8/16/32/64Array, etc.)
• Improved big apps' compilation time (still far from perfect) and memory consumption
• Covered a huge part of stdlib (OpenSSL, bcmath) and improved performance
• Added math operator overloading and function overloading

Important: the compiler is still very experimental and contains many bugs or inconsistencies with the regular PHP interpreter. It is not recommended to try it in production environments or any critical environment.

The next milestone is to finalize PDO drivers for MySQL/PostgreSQL and start compiling Laravel apps.