Zephir - Ze(nd Engine) Ph(p) I(nt)r(mediate) - is a high level language that eases the creation and maintainability of extensions for PHP. Zephir extensions are exported to C code that can be compiled and optimized by major C compilers such as gcc/clang/vc++. Functionality is exposed to the PHP language.

Main features:

• Both dynamic/static typing
• Reduced execution overhead compared with full interpretation
• Restricted procedural programming, promoting OOP
• Memory safety
• Ahead-of-time compiler

Compiler design goals:

• Multi-pass compilation
• Type speculation/inference
• Allow runtime profile-guided optimizations, pseudo-constant propagation and indirect/virtual function inlining

To compile zephir-parser:

• json-c (Please install this one from Github)
• re2c

To build the PHP extension:

• g++ >= 4.4/clang++ >= 3.x/vc++ 9
• gnu make 3.81 or later
• php development headers and tools

Once you have the required packages installed, you can generate the parser as follows:

./install

Additional notes on Ubuntu ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The following packages are needed in Ubuntu:

• apt-get install libjson0 libjson0-dev libjson0-dbg
• apt-get install re2c

Compile the extension:

./bin/zephir compile

A preliminary documentation can be found here

Zephir is built under Travis CI service. Every commit pushed to this repository will queue a build into the continuous integration service and will run all PHPUnit tests to ensure that everything is going well and the project is stable. The current build status is:

Zephir is driven by the voluntary and altruist efforts of the core developers and contributors. We invite you to sponsor our work, by donating or [contacting us][mailto:team@phalconphp.com] regarding sponsorship, allowing us to invest more time and resources to the project, ensuring it will be ready sooner and with loads of features.

Hopefully, you can take advantage of the features provided by Zephir too!