Inspector

What is this?

My attempt to implement a code coverage analysis tool for PHP without help of written in C extensions (e.g. Xdebug).

I managed to write a very simple prototype showing what it could look like:

git clone https://github.com/bound1ess/inspector.git
cd inspector
make first-example
make second-example

Disclaimer

This is just a PoC, not a ready-to-go product: code in this repository is very unstable, has tons of bugs, some vital features are missing etc.

Why would you do it?

For the purpose of challenging myself, learning new things and improving skills.

And what now?

I came to the conclusion that this is definitely possible, BUT:

• the amount of time it takes to run (especially for large codebases) is really huge (compared to, say, Xdebug)
• there are some cases where analysing and modifying AST inside of PHP is just not enough

I permanently stopped working on this project.