On 10 September 2024 19:32:19 BST, Mike Schinkel <m...@newclarity.net> wrote:
>BTW, why has nobody ever mentioned Zephir on this list (that I am aware of?)
Zephir is an interesting idea that has never quite fulfilled its aims. The
Phalcon developers hoped that creating a more PHP-like language would allow
more people to work on extensions such as their framework, but it doesn't seem
to have worked out that way.
The worse problem was that Zephir itself had very few contributors. A few
years ago, the project came close to shutting down as there was nobody left to
maintain it; Phalcon was to be rewritten in PHP.
<https://blog.phalcon.io/post/the-future-of-phalcon> Since then, somebody has
stepped up, but Phalcon work is still focussed on the PHP rewrite, with the
intention of a smaller, optional, extension providing performance-critical
components. <https://blog.phalcon.io/post/phalcon-roadmap>
Meanwhile, PHP 7 and 8 have massively increased both the performance and the
capability of code written in PHP, and even FFI to bridge to existing native
binaries (although I gather there's a lot that could be improved to make that
more useful).
The overall trend is to have only what's absolutely necessary in an extension,
and there have even been suggestions that some built-in functions would be
better off implemented in PHP itself, if the right low-level features were
included.
All of which is drifting a long way off topic, except to say that I think we
should be aiming to reduce the difference between what can be done in
extensions and what in PHP code, rather than planning any new such differences.
Regards,
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]
