PHP Programming Language - Cultural View

Phalanger (compiler) 185
Phalanger (compiler)
Operating
system
Cross-platform
Website http://www.php-compiler.
net/
Phalanger is a project which was started at Charles University in Prague and was supported by Microsoft. It
compiles source code written in the PHP scripting language into CIL byte-code. It handles the beginning of a
compiling process which is completed by the JIT compiler component of the .NET Framework. It does not address
native code generation nor optimization. Its purpose is to compile PHP scripts into .NET assemblies, logical units
containing CIL code and meta-data.
Phalanger can run real-world PHP applications, many with minor to no modifications. Examples include MediaWiki,
phpMyAdmin and phpBB.
There is an ongoing software project [1] at Charles University to re-implement the Phalanger core using the Microsoft
Dynamic Language Runtime, and to develop a Visual Studio integration tool to provide Intellisense for the PHP
language.
A project involving Phalanger was mentored by the Mono team during the Google Summer of Code 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. [2]
Early in 2008, UK Content Management vendor Jadu partnered with the Prague-based team to improve
communication between .NET and the Phalanger compiler. It’s based on duck typing 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. [3]
According to Microsoft, the primary goal of the project, released under Microsoft Shared Source Permissive License
on the Microsoft Codeplex, is to enable full functionality of existing PHP scripts on the .NET framework without
any modifications. [4]
In December 2008, Jadu announced that it has made the compiler available to the developer community and in
interviews with ITPRO [5] and VNUnet [6] said that the development would help close the skills gap between PHP
and .NET.
External links
• Official Web Page for v1 [7]
• Official Web Page for v2 on CodePlex [8]
• eWeek article about Phalanger [9]
• Microsoft accommodates dynamic languages (article) [10]
• Channel 9 Phalanger [11]