Fair enough - though I’m not convinced that it would be effective: if successful, it would allow people to do 90’s-browser-sniffing-style if ($engine !== ‘my favorite’) throw Exception(’sorry, not supported yet’);, so it seems fairly likely that implementations would end up lying about it (and yes, deviating from the spec) in a few years anyway.
As a side note, AFAIK HippyVM isn’t being actively developed (https://twitter.com/HippyVM/status/634347845957627904 <https://twitter.com/HippyVM/status/634347845957627904>) > On Feb 3, 2016, at 5:29 PM, Davey Shafik <da...@php.net> wrote: > > Currently, HippyVM doesn't even _have_ a version constant. Because it's > trying to pretend to be PHP. Having a "YOU MUST FILL THESE CONSTANTS WITH > YOUR OWN RUNTIMES DATA" in the spec is intended to help that situation. > > Right now, there's no way to tell what version of HippyVM you're running on, > and to even check that you're using Hippy you need to check for E_HIPPY_WARN. > > We have a chance to standardize, and "mandate" that the information is > exposed explicitly, and done so consistently. > > On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 5:14 PM, Fred Emmott <f...@fredemmott.co.uk > <mailto:f...@fredemmott.co.uk>> wrote: > >> On Feb 3, 2016, at 2:00 PM, Davey Shafik <da...@php.net >> <mailto:da...@php.net>> wrote: >> >> On Wednesday, February 3, 2016, Sara Golemon <poll...@php.net >> <mailto:poll...@php.net>> wrote: >> >> Unfortunately Sara, the types of things you generally have to work around >> are minor things, like differences in DOM, or the inability to json_encode >> DateTimeImmuteable > > > > It seems like the main thing this RFC would change is that you could easily > do “if ($engine !== ‘php’)” - but for almost all the examples I can think of, > and yours, what’s actually needed is if "($engine === > ‘specific_engine_that_needs_a_workaround’)”, so I don’t see a benefit over > using HHVM_VERSION or similar. > > The one exception I can think of is if someone’s reimplementing phpinfo() or > similar. > > Regards, > - Fred >