[jcrites]

If you ever need to work with PHP, use PHP/Hack developed by Facebook: https://hacklang.org/

It's a compiled language built partially in Rust, being rewritten entirely in Rust, JIT compiled using HHVM: https://hhvm.com/

I don't believe it's compatible with existing PHP codebases, but you could probably convert one over, catching safety issues while you did it.

Hack a modern and highly productive language that's in many ways as nearly sophisticated as Rust. (How many other languages have both opaque and transparent type aliases, for example? https://docs.hhvm.com/hack/types/type-aliases ). It has a mature async/await system, for another example. One feature it's missing is the macro system that Rust has, though.