[php-src] Issue #8203: Ahead of Time Compiler/AOT for PHP8?

Issue: https://github.com/php/php-src/issues/8203 Comment Author: appifys Hi @iluuu1994 Thanks so much for the reply! Performance isn't why companies like us use PHP. We love the flexibility it provides. But the reasons why a lot of corporate tech companies are choosing Rust over PHP is the same reasons why there's a **huge** community demanding the .NET Core/Framework offer a **true** AOT compiler for decades. They want an AOT solution because of two main reasons: 1. Overhead reduction When there's no JIT, no interpreter, just native, or at least semi-native code execution results in much less overhead, and therefore lower memory and CPU footprint in general. 3. Source Code Security: When we ship products, we want to be able to ship a compiled binary to offer a good level of source code protection (while retaining baseline performance) E.g. we don't want our clients to just easily copy and paste our code, otherwise they won't stay our clients for long. We want to make it as difficult as possible for them to copy our code (i.e. if it is compiled to somewhat-native machine code) while retaining performance. We are aware of PHP obfuscators, but those sacrifice performance, and sometimes even functionality. We are willing to pay to get this work done. I don't imagine it's too difficult - just caching the JIT'd code to a file, and stripping the bytecode? Thank you for reading