Ferenc Kovacs wrote (on 28/05/2014):
I'm mostly interested on the opinion of the core devs, but others also
welcome to reply.
I'm definitely in the category of "others", but I thought I'd try my hand at a replacement wording:
While rarely visible to users, there are many people working behind the scenes to improve PHP, both to bring new features and to increase performance.
Recently, a project known internally as "phpng" has gained some attention outside the normal channels; this is an experimental branch of the codebase, initially authored by Dmitry Stogov, Xinchen Hui, and Nikita Popov, which cleans up and alters some internal APIs to improve performance, particularly in terms of memory usage. The hope is that a change such as this may pave the way for further improvements in the future, such as a "JIT" capable executor, but the current branch does not include such a change.
However, the branch does give a considerable performance gain in real world applications, for example a 20% increase in throughput for a typical Wordpress setup. It is possible that this branch, or something like it, may form one part of the next major release of PHP (hence the optimistic "Next Generation" label of the branch), and discussions are continuing around what that release should look like and what timescales will be involved in bringing it to production quality.
I'm not sure whether or not it makes sense to include a link to the RFC, or a pointer to check the mailing list - if so, it should probably be stressed that the details are highly technical in nature, and require a certain prior knowledge of the engine.
Just a thought, to move things forward. :)
--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]