Phalanger (compiler)

Phalanger is a project which was started at Charles University in Prague and was supported by Microsoft. It compiles source code written in the PHP scripting language into CIL byte-code. It handles the beginning of a compiling process which is completed by the JIT compiler component of the .NET Framework. It does not address native code generation nor optimization. Its purpose is to compile PHP scripts into .NET assemblies, logical units containing CIL code and meta-data.

Phalanger can run real-world PHP applications, many with minor to no modifications. Examples include WordPress,,phpMyAdmin and phpBB.

One of the main goals of the project is to improve performance of PHP applications. The project web page claims considerable performance benefits over a 32-bit Windows version of PHP.

There was a project at Charles University to re-implement the Phalanger core using the Microsoft Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), and to develop a Visual Studio integration tool to provide IntelliSense for the PHP language.

Though some features from DLR would slow down the performance of Phalanger, they do claim performance gains by a factor of 6. These features are being integrated into current Phalanger core.

A project involving Phalanger was mentored by the Mono team during the Google Summer of Code program in 2008. During this period Phalanger was ported to the Silverlight 2.0 framework with the goal of making it work on Moonlight as well.