On Sun, Aug 26, 2012 at 9:22 PM, Rasmus Lerdorf <ras...@lerdorf.com> wrote: > On 08/26/2012 06:18 PM, Kris Craig wrote: >> Short of killing ourselves rewriting it in C++, I'm not sure there >> is an ideal solution to this problem. > > Because you think more people can grok C++ than C? That's not my > experience. C is essentially a subset of C++. Any strong C++ developer > (I think I have only ever met 2 of those) will know C inside out. > > -Rasmus
That's where it gets ugly, in my experience; there are lots of mediocre C++ developers (and legions of even expert PHP/JavaScript/Python/Ruby/etc. devs) who couldn't so much as use a pointer without <insert favorite C++ pointer wrapper here> around to check their NULLs and do their deletes for them. LLVM is written in C++, and all that's done is raise the barrier of entry. C++ enables countless idioms that haven't made it into as high-level a language as PHP itself because of the potential for massive abuse (unchecked operator overloads, for one example). Basically, I expect that going to C++ would do nothing but encourage less talented people to do much more of the work, and the result would be a hopeless tangle (what we have now is a tangle, but at least it's not hopeless). My intention isn't to turn this into a language flame war, of course, but if you want to talk about rewriting PHP itself in a language that doesn't require all the dancing around that C does (with zval, for example), C++ is hardly the answer unless it's possible to enforce coding guidelines even more strictly than has already been done. (And a side note on that, the requirement of C89 standard compliance in PHP has less and less advantage these days, and handicaps those few language features in the later flavors of C (C99, gnu99, Clang C, etc.) which -could- lessen the current unreadability of the code.) -- Gwynne -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
