Tree-sitter and PHP: Two Directions, Endless Possibilities

Tree-sitter intersects with PHP in two powerful directions: building blazing-fast PHP developer tools in Rust (like Mago, which outperforms PHPCS by 30–40x), and using tree-sitter as a PHP extension to parse 371+ other languages from within PHP. Each approach unlocks different capabilities — structural code analysis, polyglot linting, and cross-language codemods — without touching the PHP runtime.