I stumbled across something called 'HipHop' from Facebook :
Here is how Sebastian Bergmann describes it :
"HipHop for PHP" is a source code transformer that turns PHP 5.2 code (minus some features) into C++ code that can then be compiled with g++, for instance, to a regular binary.
Since much of the Facebook front-end is written in PHP, they found HipHop necessary to reduce their need for servers.
Here are a couple articles on this :
http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=358
http://www.devsource.com/c/a/Languages/Facebook-Creates-Compiled-Streaml...
