recki-ct/recki-ct

A Compiler Toolkit for PHP.

Recki-CT

, _(*1)

The Recki Compiler Toolkit for PHP, _(*2)

Disclaimer: This is not an official Google product., _(*3)

Warning: This is an incomplete work-in-progress., _(*4)

Stability

Recki-CT is pre-alpha quality right now. This means that it shouldn't be used in production at all., _(*5)

What Is Recki-CT?

Recki-CT is a set of tools that implement a compiler for PHP, and is written in PHP!, _(*6)

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., _(*7)

What Isn't Recki-CT?

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)., _(*8)

This means that it is not designed to replace PHP, but instead augment it., _(*9)

Why?

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., _(*10)

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)., _(*11)

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., _(*12)

Where can I find out more?

Check out the documentation!!!, _(*13)

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

How do I install Recki-CT?

See the Installation Documentation., _(*14)

How do I use Recki-CT?

A very simple example:, _(*15)

/**
 * @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., _(*16)

Check out the examples folder for more examples!, _(*17)

License

Recki-CT is released under the Apache-2 License., _(*18)

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md, _(*19)

And join the Google Group mailing list., _(*20)