Hi all, a week ago Denis Simonov submitted a PR[1] regarding formatting of the new time zone types of Firebird 4.0 (which appears sensible per se). This requires to access new Firebird APIs which are written in C++ (the old Interbase APIs are still provided as C code). Now the Firebird developers have written a tool for cross language support called CLOOP[2] which allows to access the APIs written in C++ directly from C. However, they do not provide these C APIs officially, so Denis provided the minimal required C API for inclusion into the PDO_Firebird extension[3].
In my opinion, this a somewhat fragile approach (especially since CLOOP's C generator apparently hasn't been tested for a rather long time[4]) and would personally rather use C++ to access the new APIs. This would obviously require a C++ compiler to build PDO_Firebird (so far a C compiler is sufficient), unless the C++ code (and the respective functionality) would be optional. Another drawback would affect the Windows builds; so far these just could use the Firebird kits provided by the Firebird developers (which contain headers and pre-built libraries), but these don't contain any C++ libraries, so the libraries would need to be built and hosted by winlibs[5] (at least for the time being). I *assume*, however, that (Linux) distros already provide pre-built C++ libraries since the new Firebird OO API is available as of Firebird 3.0. Maybe someone can confirm that. So what do you think? Should we use C++ to access the new APIs, or stick with C (and include the required declarations in PDO_Firebird)? [1] <https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/15230> [2] <https://www.firebirdnews.org/new-firebird-interface-cloop-cross-language-object-oriented-programming/> [3] <https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/15230/files#diff-e0657e20b6fc2c130f504c18ebeeac828847f17f1f8f7c3559b8fe8b2bc19928> [4] <https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/firebird/issues/8197> [5] <https://github.com/winlibs> Cheers, Christoph
