Re: Will PHP ever "grow up" and have threading?

On 24 Mar 2010, at 09:36, Rene Veerman wrote: > unless the actual php development team would like to weigh in on this > matter of course. > > yes, i do consider it that important. > > these nay-sayers usually also lobby the dev-team to such extent that > these features would actually not make it into php. Frankly I don't give a crap whether threading is supported in PHP, it does everything I need it to do. If I need threading I use a language that supports it, like Python or C++. I love the way you call us nay-sayers like it's supposed to be an insult. I follow the KISS principle to the nth, and as such threading in PHP doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I'm yet to come across a problem I couldn't solve with pure PHP, but when the need arises I have no issue mixing in a little C++, Python, Ruby, or whatever, to meet my performance and scalability goals. I go to the mountain, I don't sit there complaining that the mountain ain't moving in my direction! My opinion, and that of most others who've weighed in, is that you're almost certainly looking at the problem from the wrong angle. What you haven't done is explicitly explain why you want threading to be supported. Give us a real example of why you think it should be supported and I guarantee we can come up with a way to get you what you want without requiring massive changes to the core of your chosen tool. And if we can't then you may actually convince us that threading would be a valuable feature to have available. You mentioned Facebook as an example of a popular application. Are you aware that they only recently started using their compiler in production, and that prior to that they were happily running PHP to serve their front end without ever complaining that it didn't support threading? Even now, with hip-hop, individual requests are served in a single thread, so the language itself still doesn't support threading, and I don't hear them complaining that it's costing them a fortune. Why? Because it's not. And if it was they would have added it by now. One final thing... if threading is this important to you, then I'm sure there are a number of developers who would happily add it in a fork of the core for suitable compensation. Once implemented it's possible the internals team would accept it for addition to the official version. If you really believe it has the potential to save you a butt-load of cash, the economics of paying for it should stack up. Oh, and feel free to escalate this to anyone you please. Nobody cares. Threading has been discussed before, both on this list and on internals (Google can tell you all about it), and every time it's been dismissed because the cost-benefit calculations just don't add up. > On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 11:31 AM, Rene Veerman <rene7705@gmail.com> wrote: >> php is not a hammer, its a programming language. >> And bravo on the metaphor appreciation failure. Love it! -Stuart -- http://stut.net/