On Mar 23, 2020, at 1:51 PM, Ben Ramsey <b...@benramsey.com> wrote: > > I think Rowan is making the point that *most* of the features found in > the core PHP distribution are *optional*. Distributions and hosts are > choosing to enable them. There are very few things in the core distribution > that cannot be disabled at build time. > > > > I’ve run into this numerous times in my userland OSS libraries. It came > up recently with the ctype functions. Someone’s host had these disabled, > for whatever reason, so I had to use a polyfill library to provide the > functionality, for those cases. >
Thank you, yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. PHP is, right now, a modular product. As long as that's true, there will be hosts who disable features you wish they wouldn't. Some of those can be polyfilled directly (e.g. ctype), some have to be painfully worked around (e.g. curl), and some are pretty much impossible because no userland equivalent exists. On Mon, 23 Mar 2020 at 18:09, Mike Schinkel <m...@newclarity.net> wrote: > Which makes an even stronger case for why a userland accessible extension > mechanism is needed. > If you're using a fully-managed hosting service, you will always be severely limited in what you can enable or install - some of the WordPress hosts you listed don't even let you upload arbitrary PHP, only vetted WordPress themes and plugins. If you're using a more flexible shared hosting service, the problem might instead be that the host lets you run arbitrary userland code but not switch on extra extensions. In that case, features that make more things possible from userland would be useful for those extensions which can't currently be polyfilled. The challenge would be getting something flexible enough to be more useful than just writing normal PHP, but secure, stable, and sandboxed enough that shared hosts would let you mess around with it. Regarding choice of language for that mechanism, I'm not sure we need to look any further than PHP itself: what we're really talking about is making facilities available to the average user that are currently only available to extension developers. We've already made huge strides in one big advantage, which is speed - if they were starting today, I wonder if the Phalcon team would bother inventing Zephir, or if they'd just design the framework with OpCache pre-loading in mind. Regards, -- Rowan Tommins [IMSoP]
