I wrote a PHP->C++ compiler and bits and pieces of the standard library many moons ago (BinaryPHP: http://sourceforge.net/projects/binaryphp/ http://sourceforge

I wrote a PHP->C++ compiler and bits and pieces of the standard library many moons ago (BinaryPHP: http://sourceforge.net/projects/binaryphp/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/binaryphp/ ), and it really wasn't terribly difficult, even for a complete compiler novice. We didn't do the fancy optimization that HipHop does, but it worked fairly well at the time. The actual compiler would probably only take a month or two (disregarding real optimizations) for a talented developer or two, but the runtime (assuming it doesn't share anything with PHP proper -- don't know if this does or not) would take much, much longer. Doing it for Ruby or Python would be fairly straightforward to get running initially, but doing Perl<=5 would be impossible (for all cases) due to it being proven impossible to statically parse.