On Aug 25, 2006, at 2:34 PM, David E. Wheeler wrote:
I think that if obfuscating the source code (by compiling or
encrypting or whatever) is a high priority for you, then Perl may
not be the best choice of language for your software. And even for
Java there are decompilers and for PHP the code must be unencrypted
to run. So maybe C is the best choice.
Zend doesn't really encrypt php code.
It does essentially a 2 pass optimization. First it rewrites the
variable and function names ( which is essentially obfuscation ).
Then it parses the php and saves it in a format to run on the zend
platform, which is more efficient than the stock php base. and i
believe there is some license key that you can toss into files too.
i know a lot of people who use zend encoding, but not for any of the
'obfuscating' reasons- for performance: its the only php code
optimizer that actually works and is stable. if you've got a 4
machine cluster and need a 5th, $1k/yr is way cheaper than another
server and the associated maintenance.
If you *really* wanted to, you could run a compression/obfuscation
routine on your perl code -- though i don't know if there is a perl
version. I use the Dojo one for JS all the time - cuts down
whitespace and variable names by quite a bit, in turn saving a ton on
bandwidth resources.
it would be neat if mod_perl had some sort of optimization routine-
rewrite all the variable/function names as steamlined stuff
ie:
sub foobarbaz {}
sub f1 {}
it would be a nightmare to write, could never work with apache
reload, and would probably only save about 100k per 10mb of mp
code. but still.
