> On Mar 11, 2021, at 7:56 AM, 韩天峰 <ra...@swoole.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
> I am come from Chinese, we may have some cultural differences, and there may
> be some difficulties in communication. I try to express my opinion.
> To be precise, the fiber can only be used for amphp and reactphp or other
> event-driven asynchronous IO frameworks developed using php. The RFC does not
> mention how an extension uses fiber.
> Fiber is not like threads or processes of operating system. It is not
> parallel, nor is it concurrent. This requires an event-driven scheduler to
> have practical value. Currently php does not have event-driven support. So
> normal web developers don’t know how to use fiber. It is for developers of
> asynchronous io programming.
> I just suggest first to provide a PECL extension like ext-event/ext-libevent,
> no need to be integrated into php now. Swoole is also provided to users as a
> PECL extension.
>
Hello,
I agree that this feature is targeted at libraries wishing to provide better
async I/O. What I disagree with is that this means it should not be a part of
PHP.
Whether many developers realize it or not, several commonly used libraries
already contain some async I/O features, often implemented with promises, which
have some API trade-offs to attempt to integrate async into typical synchronous
code. Guzzle, Symfony, and Psalm are three commonly used libraries that have
asynchronous APIs available.
Having fibers available in core will allow these libraries to offer async code
with an improved, more intuitive API as well as expand their use of async I/O
beyond what it typically has been used for, HTTP requests, to include
databases, redis, file access, etc.
An event scheduler is needed for async I/O to work, but several implementations
already exist in user space and work very well with fibers, as I and ReactPHP
team can attest. Fibers are the key to integrating these event schedulers into
the greater PHP community.
Swoole provides an entire large, opinionated framework for async coding. That’s
fantastic! However, it is not a flexible tool that any library can use for a
variety of purposes. It is more akin to choosing a framework such as Laravel or
Yii to write your PHP app.
Event-driven programming is desperately needed in the PHP community. Right now
PHP contains nearly all the tools for fantastic, clear, intuitive user space
async code. This is the one missing piece.
Aaron Piotrowski
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