I'm not saying things aren't progressing, all I'm saying is that on any project there's a limited amount of manpower, and how you allocate that manpower is important. Personally I think there are more pressing things to allocate manpower to in PHP than a built-in web server, when Apache is already so simple to configure for serving PHP.

Furthermore this kind of web server would only be useful for the most basic of projects. As soon as a person dips their toes into anything remotely complex, they're going to need their development server to mirror the production server as closely as possible, especially with things like php.ini and rewrites. So why not just set it up like that to begin with?

It is an open source project, I am guessing that one or more contributors decided they wanted the built in be web server.

There is nothing stopping others getting involved if there were other things they want to see in future PHP versions.

> how you allocate that manpower

This is open source. You don't "allocate" manpower - people work on whatever they find interesting.