Introduction

PAM stands for PHP, Always in Memory. It is a persistent, event-driven application runtime powered by Rust, Tokio, PHP Fibers, and the Zend Engine.

Traditional PHP deployments provide excellent request isolation, but they usually reconstruct meaningful application state for every request. PAM changes that lifecycle: it starts PHP and your Composer application once, then handles work inside a supervised long-lived process.

Traditional PHP                      PAM

request                              process starts
├─ bootstrap PHP                     ├─ start Zend + Tokio
├─ load Composer                     ├─ load Composer
├─ build application                 ├─ build application once
├─ execute handler                   ├─ request 1 ─┐
└─ discard state                     ├─ request 2 ─┼─ isolated Fibers
request                              └─ request N ─┘
└─ repeat                               process stays alive

What PAM is

• A PHP 8.4 Embed runtime with a Rust and Tokio execution boundary.
• A server for HTTP, WebSockets, streaming, native asynchronous I/O, and supervised workers.
• A host for unmodified Laravel applications with per-request sandboxing, native OTLP, managed processes, release operations, autoscaling, and bounded automation.
• The runtime behind PAM Native, which renders real Android Views from PHP.
• The worker used by PAM Desktop, where Servo displays local web interfaces inside native windows.
• A collection of optional Composer packages for routing, sockets, PSR interoperability, testing, native UI, and extension contracts.

What PAM is not

PAM is not a new programming language, a PHP fork, a framework, or a Composer replacement. A standard composer.json, composer.lock, PSR-4 autoloader, and vendor/autoload.php remain the project contract.

It also does not make every synchronous PHP library asynchronous. A blocking extension or library blocks its worker while it runs. Use PAM-native I/O, a compatible event-loop package, a process pool, or multiple workers depending on the workload.

Current maturity

The server runtime is currently experimental at 0.1.x. PAM Native’s verified distribution is Android and uses protocol version 1; a Swift/UIKit renderer exists, while its iOS host, packaging, and device verification remain incomplete. PAM Mobile UI exposes a broad but individually graded component surface. PAM Desktop targets controlled prototypes and product exploration while Servo and multi-platform distribution continue to mature.

The project status page is the shortest accurate overview of what you can use today. The 0.1.35 release record lists exact artifacts and verification evidence.