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Are there any numbers on performance vs php itself?

It's not an interpreter - it parses PHP code into an abstract-syntax-tree (list of entities like open-if, variable, assignment, etc).

But with a transpiler, it could become an IL to PHP compilation via Go...?

Not that it would be faster or better than say, HHVM or any other of a number of compilers for PHP [1] but my knowledge of that space is quite limited.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1408417/can-you-compile-p...

This could be a step in that process, but in the grand scheme of things required to compile one language to another, the mere front-end parser is not generally all that significant a portion of the effort. The vast majority of the effort would be the bug-for-bug compatible implementation of PHP semantics and base libraries and functionality.

("Bug-for-bug" here does not mean that PHP has a lot of bugs per se. What it is is the highest level of compatibility. An emulator of a game console strives to be "bug-for-bug" compatible, for instance. Programming and programming languages being what they are, anything less often turns out to be surprisingly non-linearly less useful, i.e., "80% compatible" isn't anywhere near "80% useful".)

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