Re: PHP 2^3

On 25/06/2018 21:42, Larry Garfield wrote:

What will definitely bring benefit to real world workloads is preloading, which (if we manage to do it) will dramatically reduce the per-request initialization stage. It could bring us much of the benefit of async-IO long running processes without sacrificing the isolation advantages of the traditional PHP execution model. It will likely also play nicely with JIT. But this is floors upon floors of speculation - we'll have to see...

This is more what I'm talking about. A way to get a process up to "all my service objects are created, my code is parsed, my events are registered, etc.", and then save that state and do the usual shared-nothing after that without having to repeat that part. I agree that's likely several layers up from where we're talking, but if it's a potential thing that could be done then that's a good argument for doing this thing now.

I keep coming back recently to the idea of native support for "packages" or "modules": - a bunch of classes edited as separate files, but loaded "in one hit", rather than autoloaded one class at a time - a more "solid" namespace, e.g. visible in Reflection - configuration of declare()-style directives that apply to the whole module - "module private" visibility for classes (and maybe, later, methods, although the phrase "private protected" [1] makes my head hurt) I think this would fit naturally with preloading, and making OpCache (and JIT) more central to the engine, and fits more naturally with where things like Composer and PHP-FIG have taken the language. It might even link to FFI - maybe a module linking to C functions in a certain way could act as a light-weight, dynamically-loadable, extension. I realise I'm dreaming now, and don't expect this to all suddenly appear in 8.0, but I wonder if it's worth exploring as a framework to build around / toward? [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/classes-and-structs/access-modifiers Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]