The recent expansion of cloud-based solutions highlights that legacy programming languages and technologies, such as the PHP language, are still in heavy use. Furthermore, it turns out that for their effective integration into modern platforms, it is important to understand the legacy code base to provide modern analysis, testing and eventually compiler tooling. The dynamic language PHP would be the perfect candidate for such a synergy, due to its extensive usage, frequent issues in source codes and the need for a better performance and scalability.
In this paper, we describe a solution that combines known static language code analysis techniques and that is enhanced by numerous modifications. As a result, we have a design and implementation of a PHP dynamic language code analysis, compiler and runtime, which improves performance and allows for more advanced high level code analysis and tools, all incorporated into the modern platform of .NET Core while taking advantage of the Microsoft Roslyn Compiler Platform.
