Zephir - Ze(nd Engine) Ph(p) I(nt)r(mediate) - is a high level language that eases the creation and maintainability of extensions for PHP. Zephir extensions are exported to C code that can be compiled and optimized by major C compilers such as gcc/clang/vc++. Functionality is exposed to the PHP language.

Main features:

• Both dynamic/static typing
• Reduced execution overhead compared with full interpretation
• Restricted procedural programming, promoting OOP
• Memory safety
• Ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler to provide predictable performance

Compiler design goals:

• Multi-pass compilation
• Type speculation/inference
• Allow runtime profile-guided optimizations, pseudo-constant propagation and indirect/virtual function inlining

• re2c >= 0.13.6
• Zephir Parser >= 1.1.0
• A C compiler such as gcc >= 4.4 or an alternative such as clang >= 3.0, Visual C++ >= 11 or Intel C++. It is recommended to use gcc 4.4 or later
• GNU make >= 3.81
• automake
• PHP development headers and tools
• The build-essential package when using gcc on Ubuntu (and likely other distros as well)

NOTE: The development branch will always contain the latest unstable version. If you wish to check older versions or formal, tagged release, please switch to the relevant branch/tag.

To install Zephir on Windows follow this guide.

Clone Zephir repository.

Then, install Zephir by using command ./install from project root dir. For global installation add -c flag.

You can install Zephir using composer.

To get Zephir, run composer require phalcon/zephir.

The following packages are needed in Ubuntu:

• apt-get install re2c libpcre3-dev

Compile the extension:

zephir compile

• Documentation
• Official Blog
• Forum
• Twitter
• Facebook Group

See CONTRIBUTING.md for details about contributions to this repository.

Zephir is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more information.