PHP 8 and 7.4 come with Just-in-time (JIT) to make most CPU-intensive workloads run significantly faster

PHP 8 and 7.4 come with Just-in-time (JIT) to make 

most CPU-intensive workloads run significantly faster

Last week, a PHP developer, shared that PHP 8 will support the Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation. 
This decision was the result of voting among the main PHP developers to support JIT in PHP 8 and 
also in PHP 7.4 as an experimental feature.

If you don't know what JIT is, it is a compilation strategy in which a program is compiled on the 
fly in a form that is usually faster, usually the host's native CPU instruction set. To do this, the JIT 
compiler has access to dynamic runtime information, while a standard compiler does not.

How are PHP programs compiled?

PHP comes with a virtual machine called Zend VM. The human-readable scripts are compiled into instructions, 
called opcodes that are comprehensible to the virtual machine. Opcodes have a low level and can, therefore, 
be translated into machine code faster compared to the original PHP code. This execution phase
 is called compilation time. These opcodes are then executed by the Zend VM in the run-time phase.

JIT is implemented as an almost independent part of OPcache, an extension to cache the opcodes,
 so that compilation only takes place when needed. In PHP, JIT will treat the generated instructions for the Zend VM 
as the interim view. It will then generate architecture-dependent machine code so that the host of your code 
is no longer the Zend VM, but the CPU directly.

Read also: What do you need for PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) local development environment?

Why JIT is introduced in PHP?

PHP hits the brick wall

Since the 7.0 version, many improvements have been made to PHP, including optimizations for HashTable, 
specializations in the Zend VM for certain opcodes, specializations in the compiler for certain sequences and much more. 
After so many improvements, PHP is now so far that it can be improved even further.

PHP for non-web scenarios

Adding support for JIT in PHP will allow its use in scenarios that are not even considered today, i.e. in other non-web, 
CPU-intensive scenarios, where the performance will be very significant.

Faster innovation and safer implementations

With JIT support, the team can develop built-in functions in PHP instead of C without major performance loss. 
This makes PHP less susceptible to memory management, overflows, and other similar issues related to C-based development.

We can expect the release of PHP 7.4 later this year, which JIT will debut in PHP. Although there is no 
official announcement about the release schedule of PHP 8, many speculate about the release at the end of 2021.

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