Re: QuickBinary extension for PHP

Hi Chung, On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 5:35 PM, Chung Leong <cleong728@gmail.com> wrote: > I would like to submit my extension for consideration for inclusion in PECL. > > > QB is an extension designed to enable PHP applications to better handle > computationally intensive tasks. While PHP is in general fast enough for > most things, in certain scenarios dynamic typing simply imposes too great > an overhead. This happens most often in image processing, where the number > of operations can easily exceed 10 million. QB alleviates this limitation > by translating and reinterpreting Zend bytecodes through a statically-typed > virtual machine, with the type information embedded in a function's Doc > Comments. It also provides the facility to compile to native code through > an external C compiler, for even greater level of performance. > > > QB is not a general-purpose accelerator. It's primarily designed for vector > calculation. The relationship to PHP is somewhat like OpenCL to C++: there > are restrictions on what can be done and some differences in semantics. > Multiplication involving arrays is possible in QB, for instance. Code > interpreted through the QB VM also has access to built-in functions that > don't exist in PHP (e.g. dot product). > > > Starting from version 2.0, QB can dispatch sections of code through > multiple CPU cores. A future goal is to make use of the GPU through OpenCL. > > > To illustrate the performance gain possible, I'll use a test from the > computer language shootout. On my Celeron-powered laptop, the > fannkuch-redux script (N = 500) takes 21 seconds to finish in PHP. Modified > for execution in QB, the execution time drops to 1.87 seconds. Once > compiled to native code, it drops to 0.40 second--close to what you get from > straight C. > > > More information about the extension can be found at > http://www.php-qb.net. Fantastic work, this is by far the best extension I see in years, well done! I did not test it yet but looking quickly at the code and examples, looks even more great! btw, is there anything you need from a GD point of view to speed up things even more? or make your work or support easier? let me know :) Cheers, -- Pierre @pierrejoye | http://www.libgd.org