I Have a Dream of a PHP Preprocessor

Five developers have attempted to build PHP preprocessors over the years, aiming to add macros, stricter typing, generics, and modern syntax before PHP natively supported them. Most became obsolete as PHP 7 and 8 adopted many of those ideas. In 2026, a modern PHP preprocessor could still explore generics, boilerplate reduction, experimental syntax, and mathematically provable code — innovation worth pursuing even without guaranteed success.