Very interesting, I had no idea that lld could link MinGW and MSVC objects together. This links against php8embed.lib?

Mingw isn't used at all with this patch. Everything uses Visual Studio.
For cgo, it uses the clang version provided by VS, which has a VS backend (needs Go 1.26, I stumbled upon this undocumented Google patch very recently).

php8embed.dll is not even needed, only php8ts.dll is needed, because I disabled the php-cli subcommand.

Locally, I even manage to run php-cli, but this requires manually compiling PHP to enable the embed SAPI, so I disabled it for now because both php8ts.dll and php.exe are shipped with the official PHP package.

I also have a patch for Static PHP CLI, but it's not working because the PHP source code and Makefile on Windows doesn't support building a static version of php8ts.dll and php8embed.dll. Patching the PHP source code will be necessary.

For cgo, it uses the clang version provided by VS, which has a VS backend (needs Go 1.26, I stumbled upon this undocumented Google patch very recently).

That's the part I was missing, thank you!

Gave it a shot and updated your initial post for instructions, however, once it attempts to serve a php file with .\frankenphp.exe php-server --root=./ the app stops.

Have you copied all the necessary DDLs in the same directory?

Shouldn't be necessary with

$env:PATH += ";$env:VCPKG_ROOT\installed\x64-windows\bin"
$env:PATH += ";C:\watcher-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc"
$env:PATH += ";C:\php-8.5.1-Win32-vs17-x64"

Is anything else required?

You must also add $env:PATH += ";C:\php-8.5.1-Win32-vs17-x64\lib".

Same issue, I don't think it could be related to libraries anyway, as it would fail to run in the first place then. Shared libraries are (by default) loaded at initialisation time and we're not passing delayload arguments to the compilation.

Log:

❯❯ frankenphp git:(windows) 21:46 .\frankenphp.exe php-server --root=./
2026/01/10 20:46:22.912 WARN    admin   admin endpoint disabled
2026/01/10 20:46:22.912 INFO    tls.cache.maintenance   started background certificate maintenance      {"cache": "0x2e61d3850500"}
2026/01/10 20:46:22.912 WARN    http.auto_https server is listening only on the HTTP port, so no automatic HTTPS will be applied to this server {"server_name": "php", "http_port": 80}
2026/01/10 20:46:22.949 INFO    frankenphp      FrankenPHP started 🐘   {"php_version": "8.5.1", "num_threads": 64, "max_threads": 64}
2026/01/10 20:46:22.950 WARN    http    HTTP/2 skipped because it requires TLS  {"network": "tcp", "addr": ":80"}
2026/01/10 20:46:22.950 WARN    http    HTTP/3 skipped because it requires TLS  {"network": "tcp", "addr": ":80"}
2026/01/10 20:46:22.950 INFO    http.log        server running  {"name": "php", "protocols": ["h1", "h2", "h3"]}
2026/01/10 20:46:22.951 INFO    Caddy serving PHP app on :80
2026/01/10 20:46:22.953 INFO    tls     storage cleaning happened too recently; skipping for now        {"storage": "FileStorage:C:\\Users\\m\\AppData\\Roaming\\Caddy", "instance": "489ade52-21ab-40c6-b18a-2932fb8eab4d", "try_again": "2026/01/11 20:46:22.953", "try_again_in": 86400}
2026/01/10 20:46:22.953 INFO    tls     finished cleaning storage units
❯❯ frankenphp git:(windows)  21:46

Text files like an index.html page are served just fine. Only when php is attempted to be executed does the program simply stop.

I didn't try the php-server command yet, only run with a custom Caddyfile.
Are the tests green? (They are on my local installation)

Could you also show me the content of your PHP script?

Content of the php script:

<?php
echo phpinfo();

I haven't ran the test suite yet, but frankenphp run shows the same behaviour.

Here is a build I created locally: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B09de1rERpRUN-bnAje0K2vHcwhVoDJa/view?usp=sharing
It's the official PHP binary distribution with FrankenPHP itself and the extra needed DLLs added.

On my computer, it runs Symfony without issue @henderkes.

Thanks, I'll try this one and report back.

Edit: it's working, but it was linked against 8.5.3-dev. I'll try to link against 8.5.1 again and see if I can get anywhere after the new commits.

It needs a bit of tidying up, but other than that it looks nice.

goversioninfo expects UTF8 and can't deal with UTF16-LE, while the rc file would need to be UTF16-LE to correctly display the é. I'm out of ideas how to fix it.

Edit: all hail Windows-1252.

@dunglas I've prepared everything except for the failing tests.

We cannot switch to watcher-c from vcpkg because they included the header-only c++ version, so it's not usable for us.

Thank you vert much!

What tests are failing? The CI looks green.

You set the windows workflow to upload first and run tests later (ignoring errors), so the CI looks green but the go test run is failing: https://github.com/php/frankenphp/actions/runs/22378079619/job/64772633591

?   	github.com/dunglas/frankenphp/internal/cpu	[no test files]
Warning: Go method signature mismatch for 'User::getName': return type mismatch: PHP "string" requires Go return type "unsafe.Pointer" but found "string"
Warning: Go method signature mismatch for 'TestClass::arrayMethod': parameter 1 type mismatch: PHP "array" requires Go type "*C.zend_array" but found "any"
Warning: Method "TestClass::objectMethod" uses unsupported types: parameter 1 "obj" has unsupported type "object", supported typed: string, int, float, bool, array and mixed, can be nullable
Warning: Go method signature mismatch for 'TestClass::mixedMethod': parameter 1 type mismatch: PHP "mixed" requires Go type "*C.zval" but found "any"
Warning: Go method signature mismatch for 'TestClass::arrayReturn': return type mismatch: PHP "array" requires Go return type "unsafe.Pointer" but found "any"
Warning: Method "TestClass::objectReturn" uses unsupported types: return type "object" is not supported, supported typed: string, int, float, bool, array and mixed, can be nullable
Warning: Go method signature mismatch for 'TestClass::countMismatch': parameter count mismatch: PHP function has 2 parameters (expecting 2 Go parameters) but Go function has 1
Warning: Go method signature mismatch for 'TestClass::typeMismatch': parameter 2 type mismatch: PHP "int" requires Go type "int64" but found "string"
Warning: Go method signature mismatch for 'TestClass::returnMismatch': return type mismatch: PHP "int" requires Go return type "int64" but found "string"
Warning: Go function signature mismatch for "arrayFunc": parameter 1 type mismatch: PHP "array" requires Go type "*C.zend_array" but found "any"
Warning: Function 'objectFunc' uses unsupported types: parameter 1 "obj" has unsupported type "object", supported typed: string, int, float, bool, array and mixed, can be nullable
Warning: Go function signature mismatch for "mixedFunc": parameter 1 type mismatch: PHP "mixed" requires Go type "*C.zval" but found "any"
Warning: Go function signature mismatch for "arrayReturnFunc": return type mismatch: PHP "array" requires Go return type "unsafe.Pointer" but found "any"
Warning: Function 'objectReturnFunc' uses unsupported types: return type "object" is not supported, supported typed: string, int, float, bool, array and mixed, can be nullable
Warning: Go function signature mismatch for "countMismatch": parameter count mismatch: PHP function has 2 parameters (expecting 2 Go parameters) but Go function has 1
Warning: Go function signature mismatch for "typeMismatch": parameter 2 type mismatch: PHP "int" requires Go type "int64" but found "string"
Warning: Go function signature mismatch for "returnMismatch": return type mismatch: PHP "int" requires Go return type "int64" but found "string"
--- FAIL: TestStubGenerator_FileStructure (0.00s)
    stub_test.go:547: 
        	Error Trace:	D:/a/frankenphp/frankenphp/frankenphp/internal/extgen/stub_test.go:547
        	Error:      	"1" is not greater than or equal to "3"
...

It's only the extension generator tests though, the rest is OK.

This should be good to merge then? 🥳

This is a huge milestone!! Thank you to everyone involved, especially you, @TenHian, and @henderkes.

Any chance to get a build before official one? I'm so excited about that!

https://github.com/php/frankenphp/actions/runs/22440426838/job/64981105036

Our CI uploads binaries. Though it's obviously not meant for production use as it doesn't have version variables & co set.