So I managed to find someone who’s doing Ruby to Php compilation. It seems to be in active development. He has a demo available, and although the source is not available, you can glean from the results how he gets method_missing working on Php: implementing message sends through a single top level function. Ultimately, that route ends up being very similar to what one would expect from Ruby to C.

If you want to know what I think, and of course you do, I think his whole philosophy is wrong.. We shouldn’t have to succumb to antiquated technology like Apache just to deploy our web apps. Even when something like Passenger, I think it’s a step in the wrong direction. It’s too easy to ignore the OS when developing. My theory is that, if you’re forced to run your own VPS, just to even deploy Rails, you’re either a) going crawl back to a lesser language and therefore leave us alone or b) actual sit down and learn how Unix works. The whole Heroku thing seems cool until you realize how it coddles you from the realities of the environment. Sometimes software barriers that are created by platforms are useful for separating the wheat from the shaft even when they’re not intentional.