Writing the PHP Virtual Machine in Rust (with a lot of help from AI)

A few years ago, if someone had told me to rewrite the PHP engine in Rust, I would probably have laughed 😆. Not because it is technically impossible, but because such a project traditionally requires years of reading C code, reverse engineering decades of optimizations, and an intimidating amount of perseverance. Today, Large Language Models have changed how we approach ambitious engineering projects. They do not magically produce production-ready software, but they dramatically reduce the…