Wednesday, 14 March 2007

All About PHP Opcode Series

Jacob Santos in a post over his blog talks about the PHP Opcode series. He says, the PHP Opcode series will take a look at the theory and implementation of working with the Zend Engine in the specific areas of adding opcodes and enabling language features. The specific areas will be its implementation in the PHP language, in PHP opcodes, and when it is JIT compiled.

He gives more details about the Opcode Series in the following three sections:

Purpose

He says the purpose is to add JIT compiling to the current Zend Engine. He will not only implement all of the theory, but also thinks about how it would be possible. He also tries to learn how PHP uses Opcodes and how it can be improved and optimized by using more in the section. He writes theory and how the current Zend Engine works so that he can implement his ideas to see if they are possible.

Theory

He says for this series a lot of the earlier posts will be theory or how it might be possible to enable a feature and how it might look. But he cautions that posts would rarely look the same when implemented.

Implementation

He says, these posts will include the difficulties in implementing the features in the theory posts.