PeachPie, a platform that allows developers to use PHP as if it were a native .NET language, has reached its 1.0.0 release.
The platform consists of a compiler, runtime, extension libraries, IDE support, and MSBuild support. It has been under development for several years, and the 1.0.0 release focused on getting a few open-source PHP projects and clients’ applications running on .NET smoothly.
Features added to the 1.0.0 release to make that possible include the ability to open, build, debug, and profile PHP projects in Visual Studio; the latest WordPress version running on .NET; composer packages that can compile and be used as a class library by a C# application; and code analysis that provides detailed diagnostics about PHP code.
Some sample use cases provided by the team include integrating existing .NET and PHP applications, migrating code from PHP to .NET, running PHP cross-platform, and using .NET tooling for PHP code. “With PeachPie, the PHP code is receiving all the .NET stuff “for free” – neat diagnostic tools, debugging features, performance counters and monitoring, Just-in-Time compilation, Ahead-of-Time compilation, source-less distribution, GUI (Winforms, WPF, Xamarin Forms), MSBuild, packages from NuGet feeds, and more,” the team wrote in a post.
According to the PeachPie team, version 1.1 will introduce more interoperability features, such as “dynamic” in C# understanding PHP types, improved support for .NET value types, and an option to dynamically compile the project at runtime. 1.2 will focus on the overall performance of compiled applications and the compiler. Next, the team plans on evaluating principles and APIs and cleaning up some of the internals.
