pib VS frankenphp

I'd say don't give anyone bad ideas, but we are too late:

https://github.com/oraoto/pib

People are weird though - so it IS also technically possible now to compile php to wasm if you really want to write some frontend code in php e.g. https://github.com/oraoto/pib - I'm not sure if that's a joke, intellectual exercise just for fun, or mad php people are really doing that for reals, I'd never use it in reality of course.

Here's an issue i opened a few weeks ago in their repository asking for help but unfortunately nobody replied yet: https://github.com/oraoto/pib/issues/65

Well, it depends on the extensions you're using. Since vscode.dev only runs locally in your browser, all extensions are limited to declarative things like snippets, themes etc. or else they have to use JavaScript or WebAssembly to run. Many extensions (I assume the ones for PHP as well) require platform-native executables, and as such can't currently run the browser. Interestingly, I found this from a quick internet search, but I don't know if any VSCode extension is making use of it yet.

Maybe something like this, then? https://github.com/oraoto/pib

Uses the new FrankenPHP server to add SSL support to your local environment

Depending on the application you can already do this. For example: https://frankenphp.dev/

File size of binaries is almost never a relevant factor. Your server running your code is probably not so constrained on disk space that it would matter. It's not like it's gigabytes, it's only ~110MB. See the assets on the latest release: https://github.com/dunglas/frankenphp/releases/tag/v1.0.0

A new player is entering the game: FrankenPHP. This is a new application server which can be used instead of Apache or nginx.

Don't follow any advice to use Apache as a reverse proxy, or bundle php with a classic web server.

There are real application servers using an event loop by now, most notably Roadrunner (https://roadrunner.dev), FrankenPHP (https://frankenphp.dev), Laravel Octane (https://laravel.com/docs/10.x/octane#introduction), Swoole Bridge for Symfony (https://github.com/insidestyles/swoole-bridge-bundle).

In general, you can do a lot with OpenSwoole or Roadrunner. They are vastly superior (in a container scenario) to any other suggestion in this thread!

And up-and-comer is https://frankenphp.dev/ which invokes PHP directly from a Go server (as a plugin for Caddy) using CGO. Not quite stable yet, but it's looking good and lots of progress has been made. Disclosure: I work on Caddy :)