Evolving PHP Streams for Async, Security, and Performance

The PHP Foundation is modernizing PHP's Streams subsystem with funding from Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency. The project focuses on four key areas: improving performance through async I/O mechanisms like io_uring and fixing stream seeking issues; standardizing error reporting and introducing new hooks; implementing a modern polling API with epoll/kqueue support and enhancing stream_select; and refactoring OpenSSL extension's async handling with better TLS 1.3 support. Work began in 2025 and will continue through 2026, aiming to make PHP's I/O layer faster, safer, and more scalable for modern applications.