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

Tommy Pham wrote:

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 1:24 PM, Robert Cummings <robert@interjinn.com> wrote:

Tommy Pham wrote:

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 4:28 AM, Per Jessen <per@computer.org> wrote:

Tommy Pham wrote:

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 3:44 AM, Per Jessen <per@computer.org> wrote:

Tommy Pham wrote:

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 3:20 AM, Per Jessen <per@computer.org> wrote:

Tommy Pham wrote:

What I find funny is that one of opponents of PHP threads earlier mentioned that how silly it would be to be using C in a web app. Now I hear people mentioning C when they need "productivity" or "speed"...

I think I was the one to mention the latter, but as I started out saying, and as others have said too, it's about the right tool for the right job. When choosing a tool, there are a number of factors to consider - developer productivity, available skills, future maintenance, performance, scalability, portability, parallelism, performance etcetera.

Funny you should mention all that. Let's say that you're longer with that company, either by direct employment or contract consultant. You've implemented C because you need 'thread'. Now your replacement comes in and has no clue about C even though your replacement is a PHP guru. How much headache is maintenance gonna be? Scalability? Portability? wow....

Who was the idi... who hired someone who wasn't suited for the job? Tommy, that's a moot argument. You can't fit a square peg in a round hole. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (12.5°C)

Suited for the job? You mean introduce more complexity to a problem that what could be avoided to begin with if PHP has thread support? hmmm....

Tommy, it's perfectly simple: in my company we hire people with C skills for C programming jobs. We hire people with database skills to be database administrators. We hire people with Linux skills to work on Linux systems. We explicitly do _not_ hire PHP web-programmers to maintain our C code. And vice versa for that matter. No problem, no complexity. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (13.4°C)

That may just work out fine if you work directly for the company with all the proper staffing. But some of us work as consultants or for companies without the proper staffing. As such, let's dissect what you mentioned: 1) PHP with internal thread support 2) PHP with external C/C++ thread support * Performance - having external thread support, now you have to call an extension (more memory usage and CPU cycles). If you happen to have a C/C++ guru who can then code that thread support into PHP extension, wouldn't it still perform better at the core vs as an extension because it's not talking to a 'middle man'? Having said that, not everyone has access to a C/C++ guru. Thus not mass availability.

Are you suggesting that you need to be a guru in C to write threaded C code? I think the word you're looking for is competent.

* Portability - if you're currently running PHP on Windows, but manage to convince management to switch to *BSD/Linux, then you'd have to rewrite that external thread support. But for us consultants, we may have 1 project the runs on Windows, the next may be *BSD/Linux. PHP code snippets goes a lot further versus your custom work around. * Managability - should your need to upgrade PHP for either bug fix, new features you'd want to implement to add more functionality to your site, will that then break your custom external solution? How much more manageable is it if it's done under 1 language versus 2+?

Are you suggesting cross platform thread libraries don't exist? I wonder how Apache does it... or MySQL... or any number of open source cross-platform systems. If they implement their own, then by the virtue of the source being open, you can feel free to incorporate. Cheers, Rob. -- http://www.interjinn.com Application and Templating Framework for PHP

Suppose I have an idea and make it a project. I'd then want to make it open source and offer it to the world. With your custom thread solution, how much acceptance is it going to be for a decent PHP programmer to implement versus something that's already in pure PHP. Unzip/rar/tar > minor config for DB > Live. How does that sound for portability? Now that you mention cross platform threading, do you think you can take the MySQL compiled for linux and make it work under BSD withouth BSD's linux binaries compatibility, nevermind Windows? Have you looked at the source of PHP? For whatever OS PHP compiles for, it uses the header library pertaining to that OS. So if I want to implement thread solution similar to Per's solution, I'd have to be an expert at Windows, Linux, and *BSD just to make my PHP open source project to be readily acceptable to the world. I'll pass on that.

Many open source projects are itches being scratched. More often than not you will not be alone in your desire to scratch. When that happens, and if you're a good sort of chap or gal, then others will come along and help you scratch. Soon, with the right kind of leadership and gameplan, you'll be fully embroiled in a scratching orgy with key members scratching the right part of the itch. Do you think one person writes all the compatibility stuff for any of the above listed systems? No, there's just a lot of scratching happening. Cheers, Rob. -- http://www.interjinn.com Application and Templating Framework for PHP