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

Rene Veerman wrote:

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 9:45 PM, Robert Cummings <robert@interjinn.com> wrote:

Rene Veerman wrote:

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 9:31 PM, Robert Cummings <robert@interjinn.com> wrote:

Rene Veerman wrote:

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 3:25 PM, Robert Cummings <robert@interjinn.com> wrote:

Rene Veerman wrote:

php is not a hammer, its a programming language.

It's hard to discuss anything with someone who doesn't comprehend a metaphor.

haha. "comprehend". you mean "accept". that metaphor is stretched to breaking point as far as i'm concerned.

one that i feel needs to stay ahead of the computing trend if it is to be considered a language for large scale applications.

Personification of PHP doesn't make your argument any more salient. PHP isn't trying to stay ahead of anything. People are using it to solve problems, not to meet some phantom ideal of a "computing trend" threshold.

but you nay-sayers here have convinced me; i'll be shopping for another language with which to serve my applications and the weboutput they produce.. thanks for opening my eyes and telling to abandon ship in time.

Obviously we didn't open your eyes.

Well excuse me for not dumping 50-100k lines of my own cms code instantly now that i realize that in order to scale it, i could really use features like threading and shared memory.

Actually, you are th eone suggesting dumping your code since you said you were jumping ship. Many of us suggested that your problems can almost certainly be mitigated without threading.

"almost certainly". at least you're acknowledging that you might be wrong.

I'm certianly not right all the time. once I thought I was but I was wrong.

take this example, sorry for the crosspost; my main concern atm is my own cms (50-100k lines of my own); it's graphics-heavy, does fairly complicated db based logic, and if it ever is to be used for a site like facebook, it'll get large dataflows that have to be distributed over the servers used to generate html and accessoiries for end-users. i've built a layer into it that caches the output of oft-used pages (like articles and their comments). but adding many comments / minute to an article would result in quite a bit of overhead, to update the html for that page and distribute it (fast enough) to the relevant servers. i'm worried about php's single-threaded nature; each request has to fetch html updated in the last few seconds, or generate it from a list of comments. that's also a big query from a big table for every end-user.. :( i'd rather keep them comments for an article in shared memory.....

I think you'll find when you get even close to the size of facebook, everything you think you know now about how it all stays running will be thrown out the window. But then, I'm not a fan of early optimization of this magnitude. A good design is usually flexible enough to allow redesign without recoding everything. Baby steps to the moon IMHO.

yea, well, if i'm going to keep using php i need a path towards scalability, for this particular problem. i'd like to code the kinds of applications with big dataflows. call me a golddigger all you want, it's what i am ;) just not in the sexual sense hehe..

Your tools are up to date. Threading is in the future if at all... it's certainly not in the present.

True, lets _keep_ 'm up-to-date, please.

It is up to date. You mean make it have all the features you want. PHP is by it's very existence and ongoing development "up to date". Cheers, Rob. -- http://www.interjinn.com Application and Templating Framework for PHP