> On Jun 25, 2018, at 7:30 AM, Zeev Suraski <z...@zend.com> wrote: > > > 2. Better support long-running, async-based, microservices-focused execution > model. It's probably no secret that one of the key reasons Node is gaining > popularity is because it can handle a huge number of concurrent connections > issuing relatively lightweight requests very efficiently - which is a good > match for modern microservices based architectures. There are already > several projects available for PHP that aim to provide similar functionality > - most notably ReactPHP and more recently Swoole. > The main thing that is missing is that most of PHP's IO doesn't support async > execution. What I think we should do is add as much support for async IO as > possible across the various extensions and streams - so that using something > like Swoole would become practical for more use cases. More specifically - > the goal would be to provide extension authors with mechanisms that they can > use to make their extensions/functions optionally asynchronous, without > having to tackle the job entirely on their own. While we've done some > research into this area, it requires a lot more research - but I'm cautiously > optimistic that it can be done. We would potentially want to use libuv for > this task, and potentially rewrite or otherwise refactor parts of the PHP > streams system. >
Regarding async, are you referring to the Fiber extension? In my opinion, fibers would be the best approach for async in PHP. After using async/await in other languages, it doesn't offer a significant gain over what's already possible in PHP with generator-based coroutines in Amp. Using the fiber extension and a green-thread library that resumes fibers based on promise resolution [1], we've been able to write async code without the need for yield or await [2], with async functions having proper return types (i.e. not promise, but the type the promise would resolve to). Joel Wurtz has also put together a PoC of using Doctrine asynchronously using the fiber extension and Amp [3]. A new major may not be strictly necessary to introduce this feature, but it would ease introducing new keywords for awaiting IO and "promisifying" a function using fibers to allow simultaneous IO. These keywords could be async and await, though they would be used differently than JavaScript or other languages. See an example in the green-thread library [4], where the await() function uses Fiber::yield() to wait for promise resolution, and async() creates a promise from a function using await(). I would propose using keywords in place of these two functions. I successfully am using Amp's http-server library with several other Amp libraries to run a website using long-running processes under PHP 7.2. I've seen no issues with memory leaks, crashing processes, or other unexpected behaviors. I think PHP is absolutely ready to shine in environments outside of per-request SAPIs. Core support for async is one of the few ingredients missing. Aaron Piotrowski [1] https://github.com/amphp/green-thread [2] https://github.com/amphp/byte-stream/tree/ext-fiber [3] https://github.com/joelwurtz/doctrine-async [4] https://github.com/amphp/green-thread/blob/e13327a84be67d289aec87984f9d5c8e1fddd471/examples/simultaneous-async.php -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
