Not having to wait fifteen minutes for your app to compile and link, for one thing.  But seriously, the C++ implementation comes at the cost of many of PHP's features; a "more complex solution" would allow those features to be kept.  And while C++ is fast, a script translated into C++ is not going to be as fast as if you had written the application directly in C++, unless the compiler is very, very smart.  (I have not seen any implementation that does this; GHC's native code generator produces faster code than it's "via-C" code generator, for example.)<p>Also, static compilation precludes runtime-based optimization techniques, which has made a lot of code run "faster than C" (including C, ironically; see LLVM).<p>So anyway, all this is is a way to compile a limited subset of PHP to C++.  In doing so, you have to write a special dialect of PHP, without PHP's easy deployability and code/test/debug cycle.<p>In that case, why are you using PHP to begin with, when a language like GHC or SBCL would run faster and without any compromises?