Well I have tried to compile PHP from source on my windows desktop, by following this guide. It initially gave me some troubles as I use visual studio 2013 community that does not come with bison by default, but I’ve got by this eventually:
https://wiki.php.net/internals/windows/stepbystepbuild
However, I run into several problems, which are very confusing:
First of all, some .dll files at the root folder seem to be missing, in the official windows build you see files such as glib-2.dll, icudt51.dll, libenchant.dll, but my compiled-from-source PHP has nothing like that, these .dlls are missing.
Official Build: http://oi62.tinypic.com/o881ox.jpg
Manual Build: http://oi61.tinypic.com/2cdykie.jpg
Second, the folder /ext in the official windows build has all .dll files, while in my compiled-from-source PHP, there are no .dll files, and instead I get several folders of these extensions, and when I open the extensions I see object files and source browser intermediate files, no .dll at all.
official build: http://oi57.tinypic.com/20t08b6.jpg
manual build: http://oi62.tinypic.com/28tflmr.jpg
Now I am totally confused, did the build actually compiled successfully? Or did something go wrong? Or maybe it did not even compile at all? Can anyone help?