On 04/01/2015 09:15 AM, Dan Ackroyd wrote: > Hi, > > I'd like to get people's feedback for the idea of making setlocale be > either deprecated and to be removed eventually or just increasing the > warning level against people using it. > > The short version of why we should do this is that setlocale breaks > things. It is a process wide operation, that is not thread safe on > most platforms. Although people use it to alter the way strings are > output, it also breaks libraries that are assuming that they are > running in a "C" locale.
The PHP setlocale() wrapper can be made threadsafe in a portable manner via newlocale()/uselocale(), so that part isn't an issue. Someone just needs to write the code for the threaded SAPIs. It hasn't been a high priority due to how few people use non-Windows ZTS mode so far. Obviously within the same process there may be issues with changing a locale to something unexpected by subsequent code, but that is really a bug in that code then. If some library function expects and only works in the "C" locale, it should make sure it is in that locale before doing anything and then restoring the locale back appropriately. And with a bit of symbol trickery libraries that do actually call setlocale to change it and restore it can be made to use our newlocale/uselocale thread-local locale mechanism. setlocale() is used quite a bit and for non-threaded, which is the bulk of php usage, it tends to work quite well. It is annoying that it is process-wide and as you noted that can cause issues, sure, and that the current implementation isn't threadsafe, but it isn't something that is technically unsolvable. Rather than throwing our hands in the air and just pulling the rug out from under people using it, we should take a look at fixing the problems associated with it instead. -Rasmus
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