Ever wanted to publish your own extension for PHP but stopped by the lack of C language background? Well, maybe it's time for another take.
Zephir language is targeted at people like you.
If you follow this link, you will find these words that say a lot about this project:
Zephir, an open source, high-level language designed to ease the creation and
maintainability of extensions for PHP with a focus on type and memory safety.
Its syntax highly resembles that of PHP, only there's no dollars scattered around your code. Dollar signs, I mean, the PHP
$variables. You only can create object oriented extensions, and all the classes written in Zephir must be namespaced. A different and stricter type system exists in Zephir, which allows for transpiling the code you write, into a real C extension.
Why would you need it? This question is largely answered here:
Why Zephir. I can only add that, from experience, if you expect a crazy performance boost, you probably won't get it. First, most of the time the bottleneck is not PHP but the IO: database interactions, network and filesystem interactions etc. You won't gain anything by switching to different programming language, in that regards. However, some CPU-intensive calculations may run a lot faster, and if you worry about someone stealing you intellectual property - it also might be worth checking out, because then you can ship your software in form of a binary.
Zephir is the language in which the fastest modern PHP framework is written -
Phalcon. Whether or not to use it - decide for yourself, it obviously has its pros and cons. But it's certainly interesting to know that you have the ability to approach some of your tasks completely differently!
See you around, and feel free to comment!
Nomad PHP
