With all the news of TraceMonkey bringing an order of magnitude speed increase to JavaScript, it was only a matter of time before someone brought up (again) the idea of doing JIT for PHP, so I'll take the flack and let it be me. The part that knocked me over was the "work began just about 60 days ago" part. Of course, that needs to be put in context -- they were working on tracing in Tamarin before trying it in SpiderMonkey, so there was a huge amount of time dedicated building up experience that is not counted in that 60 days.
Even so, I think there is good evidence that such a project can be done in a reasonable timeframe. The largest users of PHP with large PHP server farms could see significant savings in hardware, and really ought to consider such a project. (And please, no comments on how speed of PHP doesn't matter because databases are slow -- such is not the case for people with such large PHP server farms). So, perhaps this is the right time, with a nice case study, for PHP coders at some of these big users to pursue resources for JIT in PHP. Cough. Facebook. Cough. Yahoo. Cough. Please excuse my coughs... -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
