John Lim has a new post on PHPEverywhere today with a look at a listing of a few PHP compilers that are up and coming.

The number of implementations of PHP continue to rise and rise. [...] I am excited about all these implementations. Most computationally intensive compiler benchmarks have shown a 5-10 times speedup over mod_php. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before we see a JIT compiler for PHP to Intel opcodes, built into mod_php...

Some of the ones mentioned include:

• Caucho's PHP5 to Java bytecode compiler
• Pint, a PHP to Parrot compiler
• Roadsend, a commercial PHP to binary compiler

He also speculates on the things that might be causing a slow uptake of these compiler technologies, things like: "is PHP fast enough?" and "Not all PHP extensions/libraries are available on all systems"...