Parsing time is irrelevant. When you bytecode-cache PHP, it is still about 3x slower than Python. And Python is slow compared to Lua, and dog-slow compared to a

Parsing time is irrelevant. When you bytecode-cache PHP, it is still about 3x slower than Python. And Python is slow compared to Lua, and dog-slow compared to any JITted implementations of scripting language (LuaJIT2, Spidermonkey, V8, etc).