Loxodon is a spike with a kill gate: performance against php-wasm and against native PHP decides whether it continues. These are the facts as of October 2026.
Runs byte-identically to PHP 8.5
- WordPress 7.1 on SQLite: installation, the front end, the REST API, 27 wp-admin screens including the block and site editors, WP-CLI, WooCommerce through WP-CLI.
- Laravel 12: requests, Blade, Eloquent on SQLite, Artisan and Tinker; Symfony 7.4; Drupal 11; MediaWiki 1.43; Grav; Kirby.
- The tools: Composer, PHPStan, PHPUnit, PHP_CodeSniffer, PHP-CS-Fixer, Rector, each run from its phar.
- Library suites under PHPUnit: php-parser, brick/math, CommonMark, Twig, Carbon, Monolog, Guzzle PSR-7, Symfony Console and YAML, Doctrine DBAL, Nette, Laravel’s own 11,987 tests, WordPress’s own 27,442.
Hosts
Node is the development host and the drop-in PHP CLI. Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects serve Laravel and WordPress ahead-of-time compiled, including this site. A browser host runs the same compiled code in a Web Worker with SQLite in WebAssembly; that is the playground.
Known gaps
Reference counting is not emulated: destructors run through escape analysis, which covers the real applications in the corpus but not every construct. The browser host needs a Chromium-based browser for now. Image processing beyond the basics, Argon2 and X.509 depend on the host’s libraries.