Recki-CT – A compiler for PHP, written in PHP

by armenb • 12 years ago

20 14 12 years ago

steakejjs2• 12 years ago

This looks awesome. PHP doesn't get a lot of love but it is really improving a lot and obviously still dominates the web... Glad the turkish bug is finally done with.

Would be really nice to see security augmentations to the language. The vast majority (maybe 9/10) sites I look at where no framework was used, the site is missing have no CSRF tokens, very poor XSS protections, and RCEs are pretty common too. I think this would really improve the language.

frozenport• 12 years ago

There is something to be said about security by obscurity. I don't want to see any security implementation because is means shared vulnerabilit.

steakejjs2• 12 years ago

What? I don't understand what you mean. PHP is not any more insecure than other languages. Some extremely secure sites run PHP....so security augmentations would not be obscurity.

An example would be built in CSRF protections through something like a form builder

krapp2• 12 years ago

I find it odd that a language whose entire purpose is mixing code in with html doesn't come with the ability to automatically escape any echoed string by default. If you're not using something like Twig you have to wrap each variable in htmlspecialchars or something.

The argument that 'PHP is a framework' may be valid, but as a framework, raw PHP kind of sucks.

goykasi• 12 years ago

PHP is simply a scripting language. It has numerous other uses besides just "mixing code in with html"; it wouldn't make sense to have something like enabled by default. For example, all console scripts would need to disable it.

mappu• 12 years ago

This means that global variables, dynamic variables (variable-variables, variable function calls, etc) and references are not allowed.

Globals, sure, bad practice. Ideally we wouldn't have any. Dynamic variables make sense to exclude, it turns static analysis into the halting problem. Luckily they're a bad practice too since 5.3 introduced closures.

But references?

EDIT: It's by Anthony Ferrara! and some other pretty big names in the PHP community

devNoise• 12 years ago

Does anyone have an idea for some of Recki-CT's use cases? I get that compiled PHP will be faster. This seems useful for PHP scripts you would run from the command line. Using the resulting binary as a CGI with Apache would incur the fork/exec cost that the PHP module avoided.

bastawhiz• 12 years ago

There are plenty of extremely large PHP applications that would certainly benefit from compilation. Before HHVM, Facebook compiled all of their PHP to C++, which was distributed as a giant binary.

maxerickson• 12 years ago

Some explanation here:

http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/08/introducing-recki-ct.html

(it's vaguely redundant with the readme, but there is some additional stuff)

dang• 12 years ago

A dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8244014.

Recki-CT – A compiler for PHP, written in PHP

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