Lukas Smith got a chance to catch up with Rasmus Lerdorf (and others in #php.pecl) and "talk shop" about topics including handling large libraries and maxclients settings.

In this first post I will provide a link and some commentary on Rasmus's points regarding Doctrine (note I left independent chatter in the log in order to not have any chance of me filtering the content, but there is very little of that so I hope the discussion is still easy enough to follow).

Lukas introduces Doctrine briefly (what it does) along with some general thoughts on ORMs and making code a bit more bye code cache friendly.

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"...