Product Decisions This Supports

Enables building high-performance, non-blocking applications (e.g., real-time APIs, microservices, IoT data pipelines) by providing a standardized event loop foundation
Critical for "build vs buy" decisions: using this avoids reinventing a complex event loop, saving significant engineering effort and reducing maintenance burden
Supports roadmap for async features by ensuring interoperability between ReactPHP libraries (e.g., HTTP servers, databases, WebSocket implementations)
Use cases include high-concurrency workloads where synchronous PHP would bottleneck, such as chat applications, live analytics, or scalable API gateways

When to Consider This Package

Consider when: building async PHP applications requiring evented I/O, integrating with the ReactPHP ecosystem, or needing interoperability between multiple async libraries
Look elsewhere when: the application is simple/synchronous (e.g., traditional CRUD), using alternative async runtimes like Swoole or Amp, or if the team lacks async expertise and needs simpler solutions
Note: For high-FD scenarios (>1000 streams), prefer ext-event/ext-ev over stream_select; Windows support requires ext-uv for better scalability; avoid if only need basic async features (use frameworks like Laravel Octane instead)

Executives: "This is the industry-standard event loop for async PHP, used by major open-source projects. It allows us to build systems that handle 10x more concurrent connections with the same infrastructure, reducing cloud costs while enabling real-time features our competitors can't match."
Engineering: "It eliminates the need to build and maintain a custom event loop, providing a battle-tested foundation with multiple backend options. By using this, our async components will seamlessly integrate with ReactPHP libraries like HTTP servers and databases, avoiding compatibility headaches and accelerating development."