"The most dangerous phrase in the language is 'We've always done it this way.'" — Grace Hopper
PHP is one of the last major languages that still lacks built-in support for concurrent execution at the language level. Python has asyncio, JavaScript is natively built on an event loop, Go has goroutines, Kotlin has coroutines. PHP remains in the "one request — one process" paradigm, even though most real-world applications spend the majority of their time waiting for I/O (IO Bound).
The fragmentation problem
Today, asynchrony in PHP is implemented through extensions: Swoole, AMPHP, ReactPHP. Each creates its own ecosystem with incompatible APIs, its own database drivers, HTTP clients and servers.
This leads to critical problems:
Code duplication — each extension is forced to rewrite drivers for MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis and other systems
Incompatibility — a library written for Swoole doesn't work with AMPHP, and vice versa
Limitations — extensions cannot make standard PHP functions (file_get_contents, fread, curl_exec) non-blocking, because they don't have access to the core
Barrier to entry — developers need to learn a separate ecosystem instead of using familiar tools
true-async.github.io