Compiling and Optimizing Scripting Languages

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