Async operating in PHP

Will PHP ever have this? That would certainly be very
interesting to have, the option to just push away a bigger task.

I'm not sure implementing an event loop in core really jives with PHP's
primary intentions, so I personally don't think it makes much sense to
consider something like this.

That said, you can absolutely implement this yourself right now in userland
using tools like pecl/libevent, pecl/ev or even your own custom userland
loop via stream_select(). There are many people doing this quite
successfully already and using the available extension it's possible to
write non-blocking event-looped applications that are every bit as
performant as node.js.