The Zend Engine is the open source scripting engine that interprets the PHP programming language. It was originally developed by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski while they were students at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. They later founded a company called Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel. The name Zend is a combination of their forenames, Zeev and Andi.
The first version of the Zend Engine appeared in 1999 in PHP version 4. It was written in C as a highly optimized modular back-end, which for the first time could be used in applications outside of PHP. The Zend Engine provides memory and resource management, and other standard services for the PHP language. Its performance, reliability and extensibility played a significant role in PHP's increasing popularity.
The current version is The Zend Engine II at the heart of PHP 5.
The source code for the Zend Engine has been freely available under the PHP License since 2001. As an open-source project, programmers from all over the world who volunteer their time and skills to expand and improve the PHP/Zend Engine codebase.
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