On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Derick Rethans wrote: > On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote: > > > Which is why we need the unicode=off switch. I don't think there is any > > way we can make Unicode PHP as fast as non-Unicode PHP. For people who > > need Unicode support, Unicode PHP will be faster and easier than any > > other way for them to get there, but for people who have no need for > > Unicode it would be really nice to maintain the fast non-Unicode mode. > > What is wrong with PHP 5.1? People don't *have* to upgrade to the > unicode enabled PHP if they don't want to. And it would probably be > "nice" to have that mode for some users, but should that be over our own > back with multiple implementations of everything?
I got to agree with Derick. I certainly understand that speed is important, but people somehow manage to develop Web sites in Java, C#, and Perl, and all those languages are Unicode only. We seem to be under the impression that the Unicode speed penalty will be so harsh that a Unicode-only PHP 6 will be too slow for use. However, we don't know that for sure. Yes, it will be slower, when you look at the whole request cycle, it may not matter. Therefore, all the extra work we're doing today seems to be premature optimization (a.k.a. "the root of all evil") that only adds to code complexity and delays PHP 6. We'd be better off building PHP 6 as Unicode-only and spending the extra time that we're currently using on the non-Unicode mode tuning PHP 6 the best we can. If we somehow fail to get it fast enough for a certain subset of users, and those users cannot afford to buy better machines, then and only then should we figure out how solve the problem of making PHP 6 support a non-Unicode mode. -adam -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.trachtenberg.com author of o'reilly's "upgrading to php 5" and "php cookbook" avoid the holiday rush, buy your copies today! -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
