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I've been idly looking around for compilers that generate PHP from less awful languages so that when circumstances dictate using PHP, I can at least distance myself from it a bit. What I've found so far is Pharen, but I'm not greatly excited by it. The prospect of a statically typed language is a bit more appealing. Pratphall looks pretty interesting, and I'll try to play with it a bit when I find some time.

I like Pharen, but it also didn't solve my problems. Having worked on very large PHP code bases, I got so frustrated refactoring them. I hope this will make PHP code bases easier to manage. I have even already developed a PHP lib with it [1] and was surprised at the productivity.

1 - http://cretz.github.com/dust-php/

Since this is basically buried, there is a mailing list if anyone has any questions: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pratphall

I wonder how something like underscore would port? There is a php underscore already, but I've found it lacking.

The two PHP underscore ports avoid the single underscore, so shared code would require using the metaprogramming facilities (which would work very well). The primary goal of Pratphall is not to port JS libraries as much as it is to keep things type safe and scalable in PHP.

Pratphall - A typed language targeting PHP