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PHPPHP: a PHP VM in PHP

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Re: PHPPHP: a PHP VM in PHP

#11

Post by lucian303 »

stingraycharles wrote: post #5

I'm surprised this wasn't done earlier. It's actually a quite common practice for a language to eventually write a compiler for it in said language; this is called bootstrapping a compiler [1], and makes the language "self-hosted". C is a notorious language in this case, and is the closest to the real chick-or-the-egg problem this is: how do you write a C compiler without a C compiler? C is often the lowest-level lan…

Which you can then use to recompile your OS easily (FreeBSD, some Linux based OS's) and tune it to a specific machine / configuration.

That's why people like Kernighan and Ritchie (RIP) are so well respected. They wrote C to the target language first (asm) then rewrote C in C once they had a good enough compiler. Considering that C is the cornerstone of UNIX and modern variants I'd say this is no small feat.

C will be around for a long time after many of the current languages, domain specific or not, become just another wikipedia entry.

Re: PHPPHP: a PHP VM in PHP

#12

Post by camus »

ircmaxell wrote: post #6

I'm the author of this library. I figured I'd answer a couple of questions as to why I wrote this. First, it was something that I always wanted to do. For no particular reason other than I wanted to do it. I knew it was possible, but possible and doing it are two very different things. Second, it was far easier than I thought. The time to the initial commit (basic working VM) was only about 6 hours of work. So it's n…

Brilliant , PHP source code will need a loads of cleaning one day or another anyway , could help making changes to the language ...

Re: PHPPHP: a PHP VM in PHP

#13

Post by [deleted] »

ircmaxell wrote: post #6

I'm the author of this library. I figured I'd answer a couple of questions as to why I wrote this. First, it was something that I always wanted to do. For no particular reason other than I wanted to do it. I knew it was possible, but possible and doing it are two very different things. Second, it was far easier than I thought. The time to the initial commit (basic working VM) was only about 6 hours of work. So it's n…

[deleted]

Re: PHPPHP: a PHP VM in PHP

#14

Post by pm215 »

lucian303 wrote: post #11
stingraycharles wrote: post #5

I'm surprised this wasn't done earlier. It's actually a quite common practice for a language to eventually write a compiler for it in said language; this is called bootstrapping a compiler [1], and makes the language "self-hosted". C is a notorious language in this case, and is the closest to the real chick-or-the-egg problem this is: how do you write a C compiler without a C compiler? C is often the lowest-level lan…

Which you can then use to recompile your OS easily (FreeBSD, some Linux based OS's) and tune it to a specific machine / configuration. That's why people like Kernighan and Ritchie (RIP) are so well respected. They wrote C to the target language first (asm) then rewrote C in C once they had a good enough compiler. Considering that C is the cornerstone of UNIX and modern variants I'd say this is no small feat. C will b…

Actually (according to Ritchie's description of the history of C at http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html) they never wrote a C compiler in asm. Instead it was a gradual process of evolution, so the first C compiler would have been written in B; and the B compiler was itself written in B and self-hosting, bootstrapped from a B compiler written in a thing I've never heard of called TMG.

None of which is to downplay their achievements at all (I still write C full-time); but it's interesting that even in a period of computing history where operating systems were generally written in assembly language, compilers were bootstrapped from other high level languages.

Re: PHPPHP: a PHP VM in PHP

#15

Post by languagehacker »

Uh, where's all the code? I'm guessing I'm missing something, but a lot of the classes in the lib/ folder invoke classes that I just can't find in the project. Are these external dependencies that weren't called out in the README, or is not all of the code in master actually functional yet?

Re: PHPPHP: a PHP VM in PHP

#16

Post by TallboyOne »

languagehacker wrote: post #15

Uh, where's all the code? I'm guessing I'm missing something, but a lot of the classes in the lib/ folder invoke classes that I just can't find in the project. Are these external dependencies that weren't called out in the README, or is not all of the code in master actually functional yet?

https://github.com/ircmaxell/PHPPHP/tree/master/lib/PHPPHP/E...

Re: PHPPHP: a PHP VM in PHP

#17

Post by nikic »

languagehacker wrote: post #15

Uh, where's all the code? I'm guessing I'm missing something, but a lot of the classes in the lib/ folder invoke classes that I just can't find in the project. Are these external dependencies that weren't called out in the README, or is not all of the code in master actually functional yet?

Which classes are you specifically missing?

Re: PHPPHP: a PHP VM in PHP

#18

Post by ircmaxell »

languagehacker wrote: post #15

Uh, where's all the code? I'm guessing I'm missing something, but a lot of the classes in the lib/ folder invoke classes that I just can't find in the project. Are these external dependencies that weren't called out in the README, or is not all of the code in master actually functional yet?

A lot of them are installed via composer (see the PHP-Parser project for most of them): https://github.com/nikic/PHP-Parser

Re: PHPPHP: a PHP VM in PHP

#19

Post by efbe »

ircmaxell wrote: post #6

I'm the author of this library. I figured I'd answer a couple of questions as to why I wrote this. First, it was something that I always wanted to do. For no particular reason other than I wanted to do it. I knew it was possible, but possible and doing it are two very different things. Second, it was far easier than I thought. The time to the initial commit (basic working VM) was only about 6 hours of work. So it's n…

With this brillant project, is it the end of nodejs hype ?

Re: PHPPHP: a PHP VM in PHP

#20

Post by jakejake »

Forgive my ignorance, but could this have any application as a kind of sandbox? For example adding a plugin capability to an app that allows user-submitted code to be run safely?
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