Software engineer Ekin Ertac has announced a bold personal project using AI technology to rewrite a PHP execution engine in Rust, despite having no prior experience with the language. The project has reached a major milestone by passing 17% of the official php-src test suite and successfully rendering a basic WordPress page. This serves as a practical demonstration of AI's potential in code translation and complex programming language migration.
Detailed Developments
According to Ekin Ertac's personal blog post, the development began with the idea of converting an existing PHP system to Rust to leverage the language's performance and memory safety. Despite not knowing Rust, Ertac delegated the entire coding process to modern AI models. Through numerous iterations and continuous debugging, the compiler and execution engine gradually took shape. Notably, the project progressed to the point where it could run the core structure of WordPress and render the user interface without critical errors, a challenge that requires high backward compatibility with traditional PHP libraries.
Technical Analysis & Technology
Technically, this PHP engine written in Rust must handle complex PHP tasks, including parsing, dynamic memory management, and built-in function execution flows. Passing 17% of the php-src tests (the official PHP test suite) means that core interpreter components like variable handling, operators, and basic control structures are functioning relatively accurately. However, missing 83% of the remaining tests indicates that the system still lacks full support for complex extensions and advanced object-oriented features of PHP.
Expert Opinions & Remarks
The developer community on Hacker News has raised mixed reactions regarding this project. Some programming experts praise the utility of AI in accelerating rapid prototyping and source-to-source code translation. Conversely, many systems engineers express concerns about the maintainability and long-term viability of AI-generated code when the author does not truly understand Rust. They warn that lacking foundational knowledge of Rust's unique memory management (such as the borrow checker) could lead to hidden security bugs or severe performance degradation as the project scales.
Impact & Future
Ekin Ertac's project is a prime example of the future programming trend, where language barriers are gradually dismantled by AI assistants. For the tech community in Vietnam, this trend opens up great opportunities for developers to quickly adopt new systems languages like Rust without spending months learning the syntax. However, to bring AI-generated solutions into actual production environments, human quality control and deep domain expertise remain irreplaceable and decisive factors.