Re:Composr – a Rust rewrite of PHP's package manager
by embedding-shape on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @08:18AM
(#49711426)
> Part of the preference is being able to run on the host without installing PHP, so you don't pay the virtualization boundary tax (we were on Mac, so it's small but not nothing)
Seems strange to me to want to develop PHP applications without running PHP locally, but I guess I'm a "old school" programmer by now.
But yeah, doing PHP development on macOS hardware is kind of sucky, because of the virtualization/filesystem issues. Same applies on Windows too. Not sure how developers are not all on Linux yet, the performance difference is so stark, even given the exact same (compatible) hardware. Oh well...
Re:Composr – a Rust rewrite of PHP's package manager
by rabbiveesh on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @08:27AM
(#49711508)
The not having PHP locally installed is a reasonable decision - if your dev environment is dockerized, then you can debug it for everyone at the same time (I have wrangled many MANY local envs in my day, and I prefer it this way).
Of course, for the same price you can enbug it - we had an issue that we changed the image for clickhouse when bitnami stopped hosting their image, and the new image was dumping all sorts of statistics and logs, and then eventually bloated >10GB of the stuff, leading to crashloops which ate up ALL of the virtual CPUs in the docker virtual machine. but i digress
In our case, the docker issues were somewhat endemic, because different people would touch parts of the local setup, without realizing what downstream consequences there would be.
Part of the preference is being able to run on the host without installing PHP, so you don't pay the virtualization boundary tax (we were on Mac, so it's small but not nothing)