Compiling and Optimizing Scripting Languages

Scripting languages offer unique challenges to compiler writers. Challenges to compilation include undefined and changing language semantics, and run-time code generation. However, optimizing compilers face greater challenges still. Scripting languages offer many run-time features which are difficult to optimize, including run-time typing, run-time aliasing, run-time class and function definitions and run-time code generation. I discuss these problems, and a great number of their solutions, in relation to phc (phpcompiler.org), our optimizing ahead-of-time compiler for PHP.

Presented by Paul Biggar, Department of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College, Dublin.
Google Tech Talks
March 18, 2009