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

Issue: https://github.com/php/php-src/issues/8203 Comment Author: appifys Thank you for the reply. We did not say performance would be better - we meant overhead would be smaller. E.g. smaller memory footprint, lighter on CPU. Zend OP code is trivial to decode and recover source code, but the natively compiled OP codes would not be, and thus provides source code security. @iluuu1994 I agree, C# has a lot of great things going for it, but the final missing piece is a true AOT compiler, which is why there's a community that's been asking MS for this for over a decade now. @dstogov I am wondering, there was a project, https://github.com/vjardin/bcgen, that outputted the OP codes to a file which can be executed without the original source code. From looking at their code, it seemed they just hooked into the Zend Accelerator, and made it output the bytecode to a file. Could we possibly do the same for the JIT'd native code? Thanks