PHP-CPP was initiated by Emiel Bruijntjes from Copernica BV, a company with a large PHP code base. We always felt the desire to move parts of this code base to a native implementation, but postponed this because writing native C extensions was simply too difficult. Although it could be done, it would result in code that would be too complex to maintain in an enterprise environment - and that would be next to impossible to hand over to colleagues. And besides that, we firmly believed that if we waited long enough, one day the PHP core developers would fix their API and come up with a better way to build native integrations.
This waiting lasted until the fall of 2013.
In the fall of 2013 we realized that noone else was going to build the PHP-C++ integration, and come up with a normal, decent and simple API.

So we decided to do it all by ourselves. As an experiment, we started PHP-CPP as an open source project hosted on GitHub. We hope that this will improve the quality of the code, and that more people get involved and speed up the development process.

Project lead

Emiel Bruijntjes studied Computer Science as well as law at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Today he is CTO, and co-founder of Copernica BV - a company specialized in building Marketing Software. But besides that, Emiel just loves programming. He has been using C++ since 1995 and PHP since the late nineties, in the very early PHP3 days.