Do compiled PHP scripts exist?

Question

I am wondering if anyone has used or read about PHP scripts compiled as a .so extension for Apache... Thing is I think I remember reading about it somewhere but dont know if such a thing exists.

This looks promising, but incomplete and abandoned: http://phpcompiler.org/

Im interested because i think it could improve performance... Perhaps someone could point out a framework or apache extension that does this.

Thanks!!

Answer 1

They do exist. There's HipHop Compiler for PHP by Facebook.
I don't know if it works with Apache, though.
You may want to take a look: http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/358
Github repository: http://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php

Answer 2

If you want to improve the performance of your PHP scripts in this way, you should try something like Zend Accelerator. It keeps the bytecode around so it doesn't have to be recompiled on every request.