September 14, 2014
Chris
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Comments Off on Somebody is writing a compiler for PHP, compiles down to machine code, outperforms HHVM

Somebody is writing a compiler for PHP, compiles down to machine code, outperforms HHVM

php

Yes, that’s right. Recki-CT compiles PHP down to machine code.

It’s unbelievable what’s going on in the PHP world in the last few years! What an extremely fast and professional movement! The latest maybe-sensation comes from the guy who has – beside other things – written the popular password hashing functions in PHP 5.5+ (and the password hashing functions compatibility library for PHP 5.3+) that has probably saved masses of thousands of developers from getting fired by providing a highly professional password hashing/salting API. At a time when LinkedIn, Sony and Deutsche Bank were “still” using md5 hashing.

Anthony Ferrara is currently writing a real compiler for PHP. In PHP. An according to some tests it’s extremely fast, even outperforms HipHop / HHVM.

Blog post: http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/08/introducing-recki-ct.html

Note: There are already some real pre-compilers for PHP, but they are quite unpopular, outdated, not maintained, can only compile PHP extensions etc. and I also don’t have the skill and the knowledge to judge this in any way. It would be interesting to ask Facebook’s HHVM team why they created HHVM (with a lot of effort!) instead of using and improving already existing compilers (that would be even faster by the way) or writing a full compiler. Interesting topic.