Arguably the feature is already "popular". I have pointed this out many times before but many other major OO languages provides weak references natively. Read the introduction in the RFC.
Pragmatically speaking (as a framework designer) you are unfortunately not so privileged on what PECL/PHP extensions people should use and have loaded or not. Many hosting providers does not give you the option to load your own extensions and does not change the default configuration. So you are really avoiding non standard features when designing generic applications/frameworks that should be usable by anyone. This means that the PECL extension popularity proves nothing. Implementing it as a PECL extension will most likely prevent people from using it. I wouldn't. Finally to fully support Weak References in the future it has too make some small adjustments to the GC so the collection event can actually be caught (see rfc/additional cleanup and __destruct()). That might also be reason to why it should be implemented directly. Etienne Kneuss should be able to answer this better. ~Hannes On 1 August 2011 04:28, Stas Malyshev <smalys...@sugarcrm.com> wrote: > Hi! > > I think I'm missing some important point here. Why this can't be > implemented as PECL extension? I looked at the patch and saw nothing that > requires engine involvement. So why not just create a PECL extension? If > people start using it and it gets popular, we can merge it to core as we did > with many others. > -- > Stanislav Malyshev, Software Architect > SugarCRM: http://www.sugarcrm.com/ > (408)454-6900 ext. 227 >
