RoadRunner is a high-performance PHP application server developed by Spiral Scout. It serves as a replacement for traditional PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) and offers a major performance boost by keeping your PHP application running persistently — especially useful with frameworks like Laravel or Symfony.

🚀 What Makes RoadRunner Special?

✅ Worker-Based Performance

• PHP scripts are not reloaded on every request. Instead, they run continuously in persistent worker processes (similar to Node.js or Swoole).

• This eliminates the need to re-bootstrap the framework on every request — resulting in significantly faster response times than with PHP-FPM.

✅ Built with Go

• RoadRunner is written in the programming language Go, which provides high concurrency, easy deployment, and great stability.

✅ Features

• Native HTTP server (with HTTPS, Gzip, CORS, etc.)

• PSR-7 and PSR-15 middleware support

• Supports:

  • Queues (e.g., Redis, RabbitMQ)

  • gRPC

  • WebSockets

  • Static file serving

  • Prometheus metrics

  • RPC between Go and PHP

• Hot reload support with a watch plugin

⚙️ How Does It Work?

1. RoadRunner starts PHP worker processes.

2. These workers load your full framework bootstrap once.

3. Incoming HTTP or gRPC requests are forwarded to the PHP workers.

4. The response is returned through the Go layer — fast and concurrent.

📦 Common Use Cases:

• Laravel + RoadRunner (instead of Laravel + PHP-FPM)

• High-traffic applications and APIs

• Microservices

• Real-time apps (e.g., using WebSockets)

• Low-latency, serverless-like services

📉 RoadRunner vs PHP-FPM

The Iris Framework is a modern, high-performance web framework for the Go (Golang) programming language. It’s commonly used to build web applications, APIs, and microservices. Iris focuses on speed, flexibility, and ease of use, providing a variety of features to streamline development.

Key Features of Iris:

1. High Performance:

   • Iris is one of the fastest web frameworks for Go, optimizing network traffic and memory management for fast HTTP request handling.

2. Ease of Use:

   • It offers an intuitive API, making it beginner-friendly, even for developers new to Go.

3. Feature-Rich:

   • Supports the MVC architecture.
   • Built-in middleware like authentication, logging, and CORS.
   • WebSocket support for real-time applications.
   • Internationalization (i18n) for multilingual apps.
   • Built-in support for template engines such as HTML, Handlebars, Pug, and more.

4. Extensibility:

   • Allows integration with third-party libraries and plugins, making it adaptable for diverse project needs.

5. Flexible Routing:

   • Includes support for wildcards, parameters, and custom middleware for complex URL structures.

6. File Server and WebSockets:

   • Enables serving static files and implementing WebSocket communication.

7. Developer-Friendly:

   • Includes tools like hot reloading for faster development cycles.
   • Supports modern Go module management.

Use Cases:

• Building RESTful APIs
• Developing web applications (e.g., single-page apps, admin dashboards)
• Creating microservices
• Real-time applications like chat systems or notification platforms

Why Use Iris?

Iris is particularly suitable for developers looking for a fast and reliable solution to build web applications. It combines Go's speed with a developer-friendly API, saving time and effort.

Resources:

• Official Website: https://www.iris-go.com/
• GitHub Repository: https://github.com/kataras/iris

Go (also known as Golang) is an open-source programming language developed by Google. It was introduced in 2009 and created by developers like Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. Go was designed to improve developer productivity while offering high performance, simplicity, and efficiency.

Key Features of Go:

1. Compiled Language:

   • Go is compiled into native machine code, resulting in fast execution.

2. Simplicity:

   • Go’s syntax is minimalistic, making the code easy to read and maintain.

3. Concurrency:

   • Go supports concurrency through Goroutines and Channels, making it well-suited for parallel tasks and scalable systems.

4. Garbage Collection:

   • Go has built-in garbage collection for automatic memory management.

5. Cross-Platform:

   • Go allows code to be compiled for multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, macOS, etc.) without modification.

6. Standard Library:

   • Go comes with a robust standard library for tasks like networking, file handling, cryptography, web servers, and more.

7. Static Typing:

   • Go is statically typed, meaning variable and function data types are checked at compile time.

8. Built-in Testing:

   • Go includes a built-in testing framework to easily write unit tests.

Why Use Go?

1. Performance:

   • Go is almost as fast as C/C++, making it suitable for systems with high performance requirements.

2. Productivity:

   • Its simple syntax, fast compilation, and extensive standard library allow for rapid development.

3. Concurrency:

   • With Goroutines, Go makes it easy to execute multiple tasks in parallel, ideal for server-side applications.

4. Scalability:

   • Go is designed for modern, distributed systems and works well for applications that require horizontal scaling.

Use Cases:

• Web Development: Frameworks like Gin or Beego make Go ideal for web applications and APIs.
• Microservices: Go’s concurrency features make it perfect for microservice architectures.
• Cloud Computing: Many cloud tools, like Docker and Kubernetes, are written in Go.
• Systems Programming: Go is widely used for tools and infrastructure software.

Popular Projects Written in Go:

• Docker: A well-known container platform.
• Kubernetes: A leading open-source system for container orchestration.
• Terraform: A popular infrastructure automation tool.
• Hugo: A fast static-site generator.

Conclusion:

Go combines the performance and efficiency of low-level languages like C with the ease of use and productivity of high-level languages like Python. It is an excellent choice for modern software development, particularly in areas such as cloud computing, networking, and backend services.