Re: Analogue of Node.js Worker threads?

On Sat, Jan 10, 2026, at 09:19, Pavel Shevaev wrote: > Hi! > > Historically in my company PHP has been used as a CLI tool for project building purposes. For > example for code generation, configs parsing and converting them into binary blobs, calling dotnet > and go tools, etc. In general it's a cross platform 'make on steroids'. > > We are pretty much happy about it except one particular thing: convenient cross platform > multi-threading. And we don't actually need a true multi-threading but rather something similar > to Worker threads in Node.js. > > We tried using the AMPHP Parallel package but it wasn't stable enough for our needs (hangs > or emits serialization errors for our workloads). And it also seems to be using a special > 'ProcessWrapper.exe' (bundled with a composer package) to overcome some Window specific > issues. Due to strict anti-virus policies we had to manually add an exception for it... So we ended > up with some primitive wrappers around platform specific tools: for *nix we start background PHP > processes with '&', for Windows - using 'powershell.exe Start-Process' for > the same purpose. We pass data to and from these background processes using serialization and > temporary files and while it works, well, it's pretty inconvenient and cumbersome. > > Out of curiosity I tried Node.js Worker threads and it just worked as expected for our sample > loads both on *nix and Windows boxes. And there are some high-level wrappers over Worker threads > like Piscina which simplify things even further: > > const worker = new Piscina({ > filename: path.resolve(__dirname, "worker.js"), > maxThreads: 32, > maxQueue: "auto", > }); > > const results = await Promise.all( > files.map((file, idx) => worker.run([file])) > ) > I think PHP could benefit from having the similar 'multi-processing' support in the > core. It seems like here's what Node.js does: > 1) Spawns/stops worker threads > 2) Passes serialized input/output between the worker manager and worker threads > > Since worker threads are fully isolated you can't directly access their internal data, > there are no data races and there's no need for any synchronization primitives. > > I guess PHP could do the same even in non ZTS mode? And the aforementioned AMPHP could use this > built-in Worker threads support without having to resort to any platform specific hacks providing a > nice and clean interface. > > -- > Best regards, Pavel Hi Pavel, It isn’t directly possible to share zvals between threads. They must be copied/serialized, and the context reconstructed. That’s why the parallel extension works the way it does. There’s also the phasync library that does this stuff in non-zts PHP, if you’re interested in a solution you can use today. I don’t know if it is used in production, but the maintainer is pretty responsive. There’s some work to make this easier (me refactoring TSM, TrueAsync), but it probably won’t be a thing until PHP 9.0. — Rob