The Roadsend compiler (a non-Free commercial product) appears to be a
PHP-in-Scheme implementation that then uses the Bigloo Scheme compiler
to generate binary executables. Its authors' benchmarks appear to show a
10% to 150% improvement compared to standard PHP bytecode execution.
Since I'm just about to set to work on a largish Scheme-driven project,
and once wrote a (horrible) compiler using Lisp as a target language
some time ago, I find this quite interesting. This kind of improvement
in PHP execution performance across the Wikipedia cluster, if available
using Free software, would be rather useful.
Does anyone know of any free-as-in-freedom work on anything similar?
I wonder if this would make an interesting MSc project for someone?
-- Neil