Re: Technical refresh

> http://conf.php.net/pres/index.php?p=slides%2Fintro&id=sf1 http://conf.php.net/pres/slides/intro/php4_arch.gif I see your point, but I also think that we should be striving to abstract this better. I know you say there is no sign of any alternative engine in the future, but be realistic, is there any sign of embedding Zend in something else? And if that were to happen, what are the chances that the API you would need to expose to that something would be identical to the API exposed to PHP? A very well-defined and documented PHP Extension API would encourage extension authors. And if we could simplify and generalize that API a bit more, we might even start to see some re-use of these extensions in other things. Someone could theoretically write a Perl, Python or Ruby wrapper API which allow them to build an extension originally written for PHP into those languages. Or perhaps some day we would end up with a truly general scripting extension SDK where any extension written for any scripting language would be compilable into any other. I realize these are rather far-reaching ideals here, but my basic point is that the current extension API is not well documented and it is too tied to Zend internals. Any small steps we can take at this point towards a general-purpose PHP extension API would be steps in the right direction as far as I am concerned. -Rasmus