annotations with compiled PHP solutions

[dschissler]

First let me apologize for not releasing my code.  I've been having serious hardware *and* OS issues that have left me no extra time.  I just bought a super cheap ticket to the US and back and I will be getting into a new Thinkpad.  Until then I'm in a difficult place.  Currently I'm downloading Ubuntu from Windows :(

So on my current project I am using (stuck on) PHP 5.3 with bcompiler (http://pecl.php.net/package/bcompiler).  Now it is a bit of a long term concern for me if I will be able to use the later versions of PHP since bcompiler doesn't work with PHP 5.4 and 5.5.  bcompiler is essential for me because it allows me to protect my source code and I suppose that it does help on first load before APC (php cache) gets to it.  Now additionally the phalcon annotation feature appears to not be compatible with bcompiler and Zend optimizer/obfuscator as well since the comments would get stripped out.  I understand that annotations are optional so its not a problem for the majority of the people.

Some months ago I posed the challenge to get bcompiler working and kenjikobe created a branch on his github account.  This code version works in so much as it doesn't throw up errors anymore when compiling but for some reason it was either doubling or halving the file output (I can't remember which) and creating bad outputs.  Due to the output it seemed like a simple fix if one was familiar with the data structures.

So I'm thinking that phalcon is already starting to get into compiler land, so perhaps phalcon could fully embrace this direction?  I'm thinking that possibly there could be two solutions for the annotation and compiled code incompatibility.  Solution one would be to create a single file that contains all of the annotation data for all of the files.  This seems a bit weird and inflexible to me.  Another would be to augment the bcompiler compiled output to store the annotation data.  Possibly this apparently dead project could be integrated into phalcon and the function names renamed.

Perhaps I'm the only person that cares about this but wouldn't it be great to be able to offer;
[x] extremely fast speeds
[x] source code protection

Regardless it is important to know that there could end up being phalcon PHP code out there that some people cannot run and never will be able to run without modification.

[aavolkoff]

The problem that you described really exists. My way - is not to use the "source code based" algorithms. Sure the source code becomes more complicated, but "protection and speed" are present.

[dschissler]

I don't have so many special sauce algorithms.  Just the way that all of my technology fits together.