On the SitePoint Web Foundations blog Bruno Skvorc has a quick post showing you how to get Recki-CT installed and working in a virtual machine. The Recki-CT project is a creation of Anthony Ferrara that allows you to compile down PHP into machine code.

If you don’t know what Recki-CT is, see @ircmaxell’s original post or the repo, we won’t go into depth here. This quick tip will merely show you how to install it on a Homestead Improved box, much like we did with other software before.

It's a pretty simple four step process including testing things at the end:

• Install and configure a Homestead Improved instance
• Install the JitFu tool
• Grab the latest Recki-CT library version from GitHub
• Run the provided test code with the local PHP install and test the performance

You can find out more about the Recki-CT project in its GitHub project.

Anthony Ferrara has introduced an interesting new tool in his most recent post, a compiler toolkit for PHP: Recki-CT.

Over 1.5 years ago, I introduced PHPPHP to the world. It was the first implementation of the PHP language written in PHP itself. But PHPPHP suffered from a few problems which relegated it to toy status (such as performance). Today, I get to introduce you to another implementation of PHP, written in PHP. But this one is no toy. This one... This one is fun...

He goes on to introduce the tool, pointing out what it is (and isn't) and how it compiles the PHP down into machine code. He covers the difference between it and things like HHVM and some benchmarks on how fast the resulting code performs. He also gives some thanks to people who helped him along the way (as well as sone of the projects it relies on). If you're interested in finding out more, check out the project's GitHub page for complete info and the latest version.