Second paragraph: However, every now and again you do want to do something with PHP that does involve complex algorithms, for which you might not have a C libr

Second paragraph: However, every now and again you do want to do something with PHP that does involve complex algorithms, for which you might not have a C library to hand. Even if you do have a C library or the ability to create one, writing extensions for PHP to expose this functionality has a bit of a learning curve. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could write code in PHP, and have it accelerated somehow to C-like speeds?