Peachpie – PHP Compiler to .NET, Part 2 | Hacker News Reader

Peachpie – PHP Compiler to .NET, Part 2

blog.peachpie.io

51 pointspchp22 comments

It's "interesting" how they didn't bother to compare PHP 7. PHP 7 is remarkably faster than 5.x.

The newest release they're comparing against is 5.4.0 which is from 2012! There were major speed increases in 5.5, and many MUCH bigger ones in 7.

These comparisons aren't remotely fair.

It says right on the page (prior to the graphs) that the comparison was performed in 2012. While they are using a version of PHP from 2012, they're also using a version of Phalanger (predecessor of 'peachpie') from 2012 and a .NET CLR from 2012.

As someone mentioned below - Phalanger doesn't support PHP 7. Peachpie will and as soon as we manage that, we can provide benchmarks.

That's no reason not to compare the performance. That's just silly.

It doesn't make much sense actually. Comparing Peachpie-powered PHP5 and PHP7 doesn't have all that much value. With that said we are going to do it anyway in the next week or so, but we expect PHP7 to be faster. The real value comes from comparing PHP7 with Peachpie-powered PHP7.

The language changes that happened in PHP 7 are, with maybe two exceptions (func_get_args and foreach details) not related to performance. So if you're comparing performance (and not language support), there is nothing wrong with comparing a Peachpie PHP5 implementation to a Zend PHP7 implementation. The Zend implementation does not derive any significant benefit from being PHP7 compliant (as far as performance is concerned).

Well. PHP 7 has a completely reworked opcode cache and many other tweaks that increase its performance across pretty much all applications tested (including the Zend framework itself according to Zend). With that said, however, as we mentioned earlier, we will not shy away from the comparison. We are working towards a performance benchmark that will compare Peachpie and PHP 7. But as we haven't focused on performance optimization yet at all, we don't expect Peachpie to outdo PHP 7 quite yet. Give us a few days/weeks and we'll publish the first benchmarks. We're curious as well :)

We have a mix of PHP and C# code (don't ask why). I'd love to have PHP just as another .NET language to make interop easier.

Does anybody have real-world experience with large(ish) projects with Phalanger?

don't ask why

I don't think we need to. It seems self-evident that certain languages excel at different styles of tasks. So if a company is using the best tool for the job, then they are likely doing so in a multi-language environment.

I wish the reason was that PHP exels at this task :-)

You are the reason this compiler exists :) many companies mix the two together. We might be offering commercial support for Phalanger in the next couple of weeks, depending on your company and the project.

Nothing personal but I am sure you understand that we would be pretty nervous about making such a move. There are so many little weird behaviors in PHP that need to be replicated. We have thousands of files and running them would take weeks or months to verify that they still work. Definitely a very risky move.

Absolutely no worries. You can try out whatever you want for free. Several large projects have been built using Phalanger over the years, including Wordpress for instance.

I'm confused about what the goal of this is. The best thing about PHP is its dynamic nature, and the fact that any new page load is a completely new universe. Why would you want to loose that and compile it to a, well, compiled language?

PHP is simpler to learn/use, for simpler things.

.NET performs better, and not being able to change the code can be considered a feature in some cases.

So you get the best of both worlds.

VERY opinionated! You are going to get downvoted to heck for comments like that.

Try personalizing it: 'I found PHP much easier to learn for ..... but when I wanted xyz performance, .NET performance was abc.'

Give a use case / example where no code changes helped.

As others have said, apparently PHP7 is better than PHP5...

You are (VERY!) unlikely to change the minds of die hard .NET or PHP people, but you'll have a lot more potential with someone who doesn't know either...

The subheading for their blog post summarizes it nicely:

"In our last blog post we discussed some of the advantages and shortcomings of PHP and the .NET framework, and pointed out why the two should not be compared with each other. Today, we are introducing a tool that can bridge the gap between these two frameworks, enable the developer to produce code in PHP that is both-way interoperable with .NET, and therefore make use of the specific advantages of both, PHP and the .NET framework:"

A language's dynamic typing is a separate question from whether it's compiled. PHP can remain dynamically typed, and still be compiled.

This.

There are already compiled versions of PHP, like HHVM. Compiling a program does not preclude it from being dynamic. Also, I'd argue that throwing out everything with each page load is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's possible to create new workers for each task which don't share any sort of state. So you can both precompile and destroy the world with each instance.

So you can both precompile and destroy the world with each instance.

I'm pretty sure that's what PHP 5 does already with the opcache.

Looking at non-jit engines, I'm more familiar with jscript/vbscript under active server pages than I am with PHP. But even that engine from 1998 caches the "compiled" bytecode of the page in a scripting engine that can be run on any thread, and can be cloned. Once the engine is finished running the current request, it drops the state from the request and awaits a new request with new state. It never destroys the scripting engine unless an actual file changes. I'm pretty sure that PHP 5.5 is similar in that regard (though I'm certainly not 100%).

So when talking about 'throwing out everything' with each page load, I'm pretty sure that most people are talking about the actual state from the request, not bytecode cache. Compare this with something like nodejs where it's possible to reference a global variable from inside a request handler, and thus have a possibly hidden global dependency. Whereas with ASP/PHP, it's just not possible without making concerted efforts to call out to non-script land.

Specifically, for a non-jitted language, a very reasonable concession to performance is to go ahead and force each request to run in it's own world, and then 'destroy the world', because at that point you can do huge amounts of clean up since you can make a guarantee that no other request could possibly use that request's state.

Computing Pi with Peachpie: blog.peachpie.io.

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