Sebastian Bergmann

I will present the following session at this year's Dutch PHP Conference:

PHP Compiler Internals

In this presentation we introduce a new language construct to demonstrate how one might go about modifying the PHP interpreter. The internals of which follow a pattern common to many language implementations, with lexical analysis, parsing, code generation, and execution phases.

By the end of the presentation, it is hoped the audience will see that contributing to the PHP language core is not necessarily as difficult as it might seem.

The idea for this presentation came to me at last year's Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC) in Sydney where Thomas Lee gave a presentation titled "Python Compiler Internals". In this presentation, Thomas not only explained how Python's compiler works, but also how to extend it.

In my presentation at the Dutch PHP Conference I want to do the same, only for PHP. While Sara's "Extending and Embedding PHP" is the reference work on extending PHP through extensions, it does not cover the PHP interpreter's compiler phase. With this presentation I hope to provide at least a starting point for interested developers that are looking to extend PHP's compiler.