I worked on a PHP compiler: http://phpcompiler.org http://phpcompiler.org. Although it only supports PHP 5.2, it has a really nice parser, which had a lot of wo

I worked on a PHP compiler: http://phpcompiler.org http://phpcompiler.org. Although it only supports PHP 5.2, it has a really nice parser, which had a lot of work put into it (a ton of edge cases in particular). It's not in Go, but it does a lot of the interesting things you asked about: static analysis, dead code elimination, transpiling. It also compiles to (pretty poor) C code. For static analysis, there's a lot to do. Here's my PhD on the topic: http://paulbiggar.com/research/#phd-dissertation http://paulbiggar.com/research/#phd-dissertation I worked on this for about 4 years, and if my experience is indicative of working on PHP compilers is general, you have a lot of fun, and a massive amount of frustration in front of you.