For more brain flipping try looking into hardware description languages (Verilog) or proof assistants (Coq).

Is this a new project that was intentionally started in PHP or something legacy? Any interesting benchmarks? Like minimal wire to wire network processing time and where the bottleneck is?

I saw md5 checksum implemented in scratch.

I would like to hear more

Then there’s Haskell that would remove (well, used to at some point) your source code file if you made any errors: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/163