PHPMagazine has this new article posted today from Ben Ramsey - a Speculative Look Ahead to PHP 6 and the Parrot VM.

In an new article, previously featured in our print edition (01.2005), Ben Ramsey takes a speculative look ahead to PHP 6 and the Parrot VM. "Several months ago, I held a conversation with a fellow programmer about the relevance and performance of PHP-GTK. The fear, said he, is that PHP-GTK is too slow to run robust desktop applications. Yet, how can this fear be plausible when so many already use PHP for robust Web-based applications? I retorted in my infinite wisdom. I went on to exclaim, What PHP needs is a Virtual Machinesomething like the Java Runtime Environment that all end-users can easily install to run PHP applications! That is why I am placing my bets on Parrot, was the astute programmer's reply.

He talks at length about Parrot and how PHP could really benefit from integration with it (a language-agnostic register-based virtual machine) and why it's a good idea. He uses the example of Pint (unsure of the project's status) to give code examples of the benefits of the intergration...