Hi Paul et all,
I fully understand (and even share) your motivations and goals. However it
seems to me that describing an extension in PHP will lead to loss of
performance, as you cannot capture certain C features in PHP. For example,
there are some internal functions that rely on pointer arithmetic to get
decent performance.
Then you may extend to PHP to better capture these "dirty tricks", and then
you'll end up with some DSL for building PHP extensions. It's not
necessarily bad, it's just a lot of work.. :)
Moreover, in your example in the wiki you don't include how you would do
parameter parsing. Or do you rely on the code generator to look at the C
functions signatures and figure out by itself what to do? (actually there is
some ambiguity, AFAIR, and thus guessing cannot be done reliably)
To summarize my e-mail, I believe this is a very interesting idea, but needs
a lot more thinking :) It's a nice SoC project nethertheless.
Nuno
----- Original Message -----
Hi,
I've added a new RFC to the wiki
(http://wiki.php.net/rfc/remove_zend_api). It details a plan to try
and decouple the Zend engine from the libraries, in order to allow
large scale changes to the Zend engine in the future. The RFC
describes a prototype phase of the project, which could reasonably be
done within a GSOC project, so I have added it to the GSOC 09 page
(http://wiki.php.net/gsoc/2009#prototyping_removal_of_the_zend_api).
If anybody has any comments, I'd be delighted to hear them. If anybody
knows (or is) a good student looking for a GSOC project (and I've left
it late, there are only 3 days left to apply), please encourage the
student to look at this. Finally, if anybody is interested in helping
mentor this as part of the GSOC, I'd be grateful for the help (I have
to start writing my thesis soon).
Thanks,
Paul
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