Remember when we were talking about compiling your scripts to make them work a bit faster with PHP? And, remember that, not only did you have to know C to do it, but you also had to interface with the PHP engine to get it to work? Well, this just might change a few things.

Over on the php|architect weblog they have the first successful creation of a PHP-to-C utility that can create an extension for you, based on some PHP code. I finally managed to compile a not-so-trivial PHP script (courtesy of John) into working C code. The results are quite good, although there's still a huge potential for optimizing the output.

Huge potential is right - this could be a major step forward in the PHP world. Imagine, writing up a script to do exactly what you need, then passing it through this module, and a C extension pops out the other end, ready to compile in. There'd be custom builds all over the place, but things would run even faster than they do now (and PHP is already one of the fastest I've seen!).

Thanks to PHPEverywhere for the link...