The Core of PHP

Recently I had some study about the PHP. It is my favorite language from C. I really want to know what exactly happening inside the PHP. Ok, here are the information. As you know the PHP is written in C. The PHP’s core contains two parts, the first and lowest level is the Zend Engine and the second is the PHP Core.

The Zend Engine:

It handles parsing a human-readable script into machine-readable tokens, and then executing those tokens within a process space. ZE also handles memory management, variable scope, and dispatching function calls.

The PHP Core:

PHP handles communication with, and bindings to, the SAPI layer (Server Application Programming Interface, also commonly used to refer to the host environment – Apache, IIS, CLI, CGI, etc). It also provides a unified control layer for safe_mode and open_basedir checks, as well as the streams layer which associates file and network I/O with userspace functions like fopen(), fread(), and fwrite().

You can get the php source code form the svn, from this source you can compile it for your purpose.

The SVN Path

//PHP 5.2:
svn checkout http://svn.php.net/repository/php/php-src/branches/PHP_5_2 php-src-5.2
//PHP 5.3:
svn checkout http://svn.php.net/repository/php/php-src/branches/PHP_5_3 php-src-5.3
//PHP 6:
svn checkout http://svn.php.net/repository/php/php-src/trunk php-src

For the coming articles you will find some interesting things about PHP.