The Recki Compiler Toolkit for PHP

Disclaimer: This is not an official Google product.

Warning: This is an incomplete work-in-progress.

Recki-CT is pre-alpha quality right now. This means that it shouldn't be used in production at all.

Recki-CT is a set of tools that implement a compiler for PHP, and is written in PHP!

Specifically, Recki-CT compiles a subset of PHP code. The subset is designed to allow a code base to be statically analyzed. This means that global variables, dynamic variables (variable-variables, variable function calls, etc) and references are not allowed.

Recki-CT is not a re-implementation of PHP. It aims to be a limited subset of the language (one that can be staticly reasoned about).

This means that it is not designed to replace PHP, but instead augment it.

PHP itself isn't slow. It's plenty fast enough for most use-cases. As a language, PHP has a lot of corner cases and results in a really complex engine implementation. As such, rewriting a new engine isn't going to gain you a lot. The complexity is going to be in there somewhere.

So with Recki-CT, we take a different approach. Rather than rewriting the entire engine, we sit on top of an existing engine. The compiler then can compile PHP code into native machine code which can out-perform most JIT compiled implementations (sometimes by very significant margins).

The designed mode of operation for Recki is as an AOT (Ahead-Of-Time) compiler. Since it uses aggressive analysis and optimizations, runtime compilation would be a inefficient target. Instead, an Intermediate Representation can be cached, leaving only the final conversion to machine code to happen at runtime.

Check out the documentation!!!

1. Introduction and FAQ
2. Installation
3. Basic Operation
4. Types
5. Intermediate Representation

See the Installation Documentation.

A very simple example:

/**
 * @return void
 */
function foo($bar) {}

// Instead of using:
foo($baz);

// Use:
$foo = Jit::JitFu('foo');
$foo($baz);

Note that a docblock must be present, and must document every parameter type and the return type.

Check out the examples folder for more examples!

Recki-CT is released under the Apache-2 License.

See CONTRIBUTING.md

And join the Google Group mailing list.