The Just-In-Time compiler (JIT) has opened up new avenues for PHP. This article explores how PHP’s recent implementation of JIT improves its performance.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. PHP is the most popular web scripting language and has been available for many years. With the release of the major version of PHP 5, it has been quite stable and is a popular choice among web developers. There are almost 244 million sites built using PHP as a serverside language. In 2020, PHP 8 was released, introducing many syntactically visible features such as attributes, named argument, and union types. All of these features are not so apparent, and according to many PHP developers, the Just-In-Time compiler (JIT) is the most important milestone. This has opened up new avenues for PHP in comparison to other languages in the market. In this article, we are going to explore how the PHP language is executed and how PHP’s recent implementation of JIT improves its performance. As stated earlier, an interpreted language like PHP is a popular choice for developing web apps due to its flexibility and ease of coding. It does not require recompilation every time you change your code, and developers do not need to worry about the nitty-gritty details of memory management. However, this flexibility comes at the cost of execution speed. Because the interpreter has to analyze, parse and compile the source code on the fly, it adds an extra overhead before every execution, which results in slow code execution.
