A detailed talk about the history and evolution of PHP, focusing on the development of PHP 7. The speaker discusses his early involvement with PHP in 1997, the performance improvements made in PHP 7 compared to previous versions, and the technical changes that enabled these improvements. The talk includes case studies showing real-world performance gains and discusses future plans for PHP development including JIT compilation.

Chris discusses how developers can add custom syntax to PHP using different approaches. He explains three main methods: submitting syntax changes to PHP core, creating a custom compiler, and using language macros through tools like 'yay' and 'pre'. The talk focuses heavily on language macros as a practical solution, demonstrating examples like shorter closures, async/await syntax, and class accessors that allow developers to write cleaner, more expressive code while maintaining PHP compatibility.

This talk explores PHP parsing using the PHP-Parser library. The speaker demonstrates how to parse PHP code into an abstract syntax tree (AST), manipulate the AST, and transform it back into PHP code. Through practical examples, he shows how to modify strings, remove dump statements, and wrap echo statements in function calls - techniques that are used in tools like Laravel Tinker Well.