I used to play with TSRM days ago and successfully implemented userland threading support using GNU Pth. It's just a proof of concept and I did it for fun.
If interested, check out http://github.com/moriyoshi/php-src/tree/PHP_5_3-threading/ and read http://github.com/moriyoshi/php-src/blob/PHP_5_3-threading/ext/threading/README for detail (not much information though). Also note that the language syntax was extended there so it would support golang-like message passing. <?php function sub($i, $ch) { for (;;) { // receive the message from $ch $a = <- [$ch]; printf("%d: %s\n", $i, $a); } } $ch = thread_message_queue_create(); for ($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++) { thread_create('sub', $i, $ch); } $i = 0; for (;;) { // send $i to $ch [$ch] <- $i++; usleep(50000); } ?> Moriyoshi On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 11:32 PM, speedy <speedy.s...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello PHP folks, > > I've seen this discussed previously, and would like to add a few > arguments for the multi-threading side vs. async processing, > which I've seen mentioned as a viable alternative: > > 1. Imagine that from time to time, some background processing takes 1 > second of CPU time - w/o multithreading, all your async operations, > like accepting a connection to a socket, aio or others are basically > stalled. So, async is a good approach, but does not work as a magic > wand for all problem spaces. Alternatively, you could fork and then do > the > processing, but then the state syncing of the forked background > processing > results with the main thread requires a whole new protocol / switching to > interprocess communication, which makes such developments unnecessarily > hard. Threads exist for a _reason_ not only because they sound cool. > > 2. Without thread support, it is not possible to use multi-core > processing > paradigms directly from PHP - which means PHP relies on external > frameworks for > that feature, which, in a sense, makes it a non-general-purpose language. > It _could become_ a general purpouse tool, if it had proper > multi-threading > support built-in. > > I, personally, considered developing websockets / nanoserv server stack > with PHP > and bumped into the multithreading limitation - AFAIK it is the only big > feature > separating PHP from the general purpouse languages. Everything else is > well > integrated with lots of external libraries/modules giving rise to > potential rapid > application development while using it. > > Cheers and let me know about your thoughts, and potential core > implementation > issues regarding developing this language feature. > > -- > Best regards, > speedy mailto:speedy.s...@gmail.com > > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
