I released php-quic 1.0.0, a PHP extension that gives you raw QUIC transport with first-class access to streams. It links against the same OpenSSL that PHP already links against, and that is the whole trick.

Why This Was Awkward Before

QUIC is not a protocol you bolt on in userland. It is TLS 1.3, congestion control, loss recovery, and stream multiplexing, all riding on UDP, and all of it has to be right before you can send a single useful byte.

You could get there from PHP if you were willing to bind to a foreign QUIC library like ngtcp2 or quiche through FFI. That works, but now your PHP app carries a second TLS stack, a second set of CVEs to track, a build story that involves Rust, and a version matrix that has nothing to do with the one your distro maintains. For a language whose entire deployment story is "the package manager handles it," that is a lot of rope.

What Changed