I would like to submit my extension for consideration for inclusion in PECL.
QB is an extension designed to enable PHP applications to better handle computationally intensive tasks. While PHP is in general fast enough for most things, in certain scenarios dynamic typing simply imposes too great an overhead. This happens most often in image processing, where the number of operations can easily exceed 10 million. QB alleviates this limitation by translating and reinterpreting Zend bytecodes through a statically-typed virtual machine, with the type information embedded in a function's Doc Comments. It also provides the facility to compile to native code through an external C compiler, for even greater level of performance. QB is not a general-purpose accelerator. It's primarily designed for vector calculation. The relationship to PHP is somewhat like OpenCL to C++: there are restrictions on what can be done and some differences in semantics. Multiplication involving arrays is possible in QB, for instance. Code interpreted through the QB VM also has access to built-in functions that don't exist in PHP (e.g. dot product). Starting from version 2.0, QB can dispatch sections of code through multiple CPU cores. A future goal is to make use of the GPU through OpenCL. To illustrate the performance gain possible, I'll use a test from the computer language shootout. On my Celeron-powered laptop, the fannkuch-redux script (N = 500) takes 21 seconds to finish in PHP. Modified for execution in QB, the execution time drops to 1.87 seconds. Once compiled to native code, it drops to 0.40 second--close to what you get from straight C. More information about the extension can be found at http://www.php-qb.net.
