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PHP 5 Released; PHP Compiler, Too
TheTomcat writes "After years of anticipation, PHP 5 was released today. This release represents a milestone in the evolution of PHP. It sports the new Zend Engine II, a completely re-worked object model, and many many new features. Check it and the changelog out."
In other PHP news, remote_bob writes "There have been many attempts, like
BinaryPHP
and PASM,
but finally there is a complete
compiler
for PHP. The Roadsend compiler produces standalone, native executables, and supports the entire PHP language (but not all extensions). It uses
Bigloo Scheme
to do its job, a variant of Lisp, the language that
Paul Graham writes about.
Benchmarks say that performance is pretty good. Is this another sign that dynamic languages are the future?"
One of our design goals for PHP 5, was to keep backwards compatibility as much as possible. Actually most PHP 4 sites run out of the box with PHP 5. If there are problems, there's a compatibility mode (configurable via php.ini) which makes the object-oriented model behave the same as in PHP 4.
Bottom-line: Very few people will have problems doing the upgrade. Of course you should thoroughly test your site before upgrading.
Yes the official interpreter is cross-platform, it is available for *nix and Windows.
Check out the downloads section at php.net for Windows binaries and *nix source, and here you can find more details on PHP under Mac OS X.
As for the compiler in the story, I haven't tried it before so I don't know.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
http://www.roadsend.com/home/index.php?pageID=faq
$400 for the license, which is only good for one year. After that, it won't compile until you renew.
Doesn't seem worth it for the casual hobbyist...
Any decent language has full PCRE support these days. Perls days as regular expression king are in the past. Sure it may have set the standard for how it's done, but now it's no longer a selling point. Plenty of other nicer languages exist.
TODO: Something witty here...
PHP itself including the zend engine is 100% opensource, You can download the source you can browse the cvs to your hearts content and see everything.
The products they produce to support the development of php the closed source.
You do not need to touch, use or otherwise dirty your poor soul with any "non-free" software to use php.
There is nothing wrong with this business model, get over it.
Personal Website
If you'd like to see what's new in PHP 5, we got some of the leading PHP developers to write about new extensions they developed.
I also posted the first chapter of my PHP 5 book in that section which gives an overview of what's new in PHP 5. This book will be part of the Bruce Perens series of Prentice-Hall and will therefore be open-source and freely accessible to anyone.
Sometimes, it also implies things like dynamically extensible type definitions at runtime, automatic memory management, and support for various functional-style features such as closures.
Compiling a dynamic language to machine code is usually a challenging problem.
Yes I can confirm. We, as in Zend, are working with Sun on the JSR 223. The result will be a Sun reference implementation of the standard (based on PHP) which defines what the interface between PHP (and other scripting languages) and Java will look like.
The problem isn't the core of PHP, but the dozens of PHP extensions and third-party libraries they use. Even if a library claims thread-safety, it is not always so. Therefore, we (as in the PHP development team) recommend to use PHP with the pre-fork MPM of Apache 2 or with Apache 1.3.
The only thing I would add is that Mac OS X users should install Ruby themselvesbefore making any judgements on it. The version shipped with Panther is a bit dated, and if I recall correctly lacks some of the features you get from installing it yourself.