If you’re neither worried about PHP internals nor PHP 8, skip this.

If you’re a fellow nerd, this is pretty cool. First JIT compilers (which stands for “just in time”) are just a cool idea. Rather than up-front optimization, you get to do it as it’s necessary. But that they’re coming to PHP 8 isn’t the only news. It’s awesome that PHP will get a JIT in PHP 8 means that we can expect that server-side language of WordPress (which has already been steadily getting faster for the last 5 years), will get better. Pretty great!

But the post I’m linking to is more than an announcement abput the future of PHP. It’s also a smart “stuff you should know” article by someone who knows, Joe “Krakjoe” Watkins who has been doing PHP internal stuff for years. Here’s my favorite of his clarifying points:

Will the JIT make my website faster ?

In all probability, not significantly.

Maybe not the answer you were expecting: In the general case, applications written in PHP are I/O bound, and JIT works best on CPU bound code.

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