Phalanger is a compiler front end for compiling

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...

source code into CIL byte-code, which can be further processed by the

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's just-in-time compiler. The project was started at Charles University and is supported by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

. Phalanger was discontinued in favor of the more modern PeachPie compiler, which utilizes the Roslyn API.

Compatibility

Phalanger can run real-world PHP applications, many with minor to no modifications. Examples include

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, phpMyAdmin and

phpBB phpBB is an Internet forum package written in the PHP scripting language. The name "phpBB" is an abbreviation of ''PHP Bulletin Board''. Available under the GNU General Public License, phpBB is free and open-source. Features of phpBB include ...

Performance

One of the main goals of the project is to improve performance of

applications. The project web page claims considerable performance benefits over a 32-bit Windows version of PHP. There was a project at Charles University to re-implement the Phalanger core using the Microsoft Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), and to develop a

Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such ...

integration tool to provide IntelliSense for the PHP language. Though some features from DLR would slow down the performance of Phalanger, they do claim performance gains by a factor of 6. These features are being integrated into current Phalanger core.

Google Summer of Code

A project involving Phalanger was mentored by the Mono team during the

Google Summer of Code The Google Summer of Code, often abbreviated to GSoC, is an international annual program in which Google awards stipends to contributors who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project during the summer. , the program is ...

program in 2008. During this period Phalanger was ported to the Silverlight 2.0 framework with the goal of making it work on Moonlight as well.

Jadu sponsorship

Early in 2008, UK Content Management vendor Jadu partnered with the Prague-based team to improve communication between .NET and the Phalanger compiler. It is based on

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and provides a way for accessing objects from the dynamic PHP world that lack compile-time type information from a statically typed language in a .NET environment in a type-safe way. In December 2008, Jadu announced that it has made the compiler available to the developer community and in interviews with ITPRO and VNUnet said that the development would help close the skills gap between PHP and .NET.

Devsense support & development

Since 2009, DEVSENSE company leads the development of the project and offers commercial support. DEVSENSE consists of core Phalanger developers and keeps this open-source project alive. In addition to maintenance and growth of the project, Devsense is providing Visual Studio integration of Phalanger for the community. Since 2012, DEVSENSE provides support forum for Phalanger (compiler) and related projects for the community.

Legacy

The last PHP version supported by Phalanger is 5.4. The GitHub project is marked "Deprecated" and (as of 2019) it hasn't been updated for years. The GitHub page also announces a new project, ''

PeachPie PeachPie is an open-source PHP language compiler and runtime for the .NET Framework and .NET. It is built on top of the Microsoft Roslyn compiler platform and is based on the first-generation Phalanger project. PeachPie compiles source code writt ...

'' compiler as its successor for PHP 7.1. ''PeachPie'' can compile code using PHP 5.4 syntax or newer, and is officially supported by

.NET Foundation The .NET Foundation is an organization incorporated on March 31, 2014, by Microsoft to improve open-source software development and collaboration around the .NET Framework. It was launched at the annual Build 2014 conference held by Microsoft. T ...

References

External links

Phalanger PHP compiler blogPhalanger discussion forumPhalanger commercial supportPhalanger source control and issue trackerOfficial Web Page for previous version 1.0eWeek article about PhalangerMicrosoft accommodates dynamic languages (article)Channel 9 Phalanger
{{Common Language Infrastructure .NET programming tools PHP software WordPress