Introduction

From the start, one of the design goals of phc has been to provide a useful framework for writing applications that process PHP scripts. phc parses PHP code into an internal representation known as an abstract syntax tree or AST. Applications can process PHP code by analysing and modifying this abstract representation in one of two ways:

• phc supports plugins. Plugins are modules that can be loaded into phc, which get access to the AST. phc provides sophisticated support for writing operations over the AST through the Tree Transformation API.
• Alternatively, you can export the AST to XML. You can then process the XML (for example, using the PHP SimpleXML extension) in any way you like, and then use phc to convert the XML back to PHP.

The Tree Traversal API Tutorials explain how to write plugins for phc, and provide numerous examples. You will find Reference very useful when writing serious applications using phc.

Although we have tried to document phc as well as we can, if anything is still unclear, please let us know by sending an email to the mailing list.

System Requirements

If you want to modify the internals of phc in other ways than through the explicit API we provide for doing so, you will following tools listed below, in addition to those detailed in the user manual (Installation Instructions). However, most people should not need these tools (even if you are implementing tools based on phc).

• flex if you need to modify the lexical analyser.
• bison if you need to modify the parser.
• maketea if you want to modify the phc grammars (or the AST/HIR/MIR classes).
• gengetopt if you need to add additional command line arguments; you will need version 0.20 or higher.
• gperf if you need to modify the list of keywords recognized by the lexical analyser.
• PHP if you need to compile PHP code, or use the dataflow branch. See the next section for instructions on configuring PHP for use.
• automake, autoconf and autoconf-archive <http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf-archive/>_ if you want to add files to be compiled as part of phc.

Building PHP for phc development

When compiling PHP for use with phc, there are a few options:

• Development: For developing phc or debugging phc problems, it is worthwhile to have debugging symbols and leak checkers enabled.

  CFLAGS="-O0 -ggdb3" ./configure --enable-debug --enable-maintainer-zts --enable-embed

• Deployment: For performance, optimization should be used:

  CFLAGS="-O3 -g" ./configure --enable-embed

• Benchmarking: In order to be fair, both phc-generated-code and PHP should both be compiled with -O3. The are also some options required to run some benchmarks. The prefix is supplied to correspond to benchmarking scripts we provide:

  CFLAGS="-O3 -DNDEBUG" ./configure --enable-embed --enable-bcmath --with-gmp --prefix=/usr/local/php-opt