Unicode-compatible extensions (was Re: [PHP-DEV] type hinting throwing a fatal error)

At 17:37 24/08/2005, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

Steph wrote: Hi Rasmus,

Steph wrote:

If there's the capability to run PHP 6 without Unicode support, surely there's no reason for extensions to lose back compatability when they're updated...?

That's going to be tough. They will definitely lose binary compatibility because all sorts of internal structures are changing which a runtime switch can't do anything about. We may be able to keep compatibility at the source level, but having extensions that fall over when you turn on unicode semantics would be a real pain. It might be a feature to break them and have a nice FAQ on what needs to be done to upgrade the extension to support Unicode.

Ouf - you're effectively saying that Unicode support will need to be enabled via INI directives on a per-extension basis? Or that there will need to be two versions of every PHP extension? Not at all. But it would be nice if the extension did something intelligent when passed an IS_UNICODE string. IS_UNICODE strings don't just exist when unicode semantics are turned on either. So it actually doesn't matter if that switch is on or not, extensions should handle Unicode strings.

Maybe we can give extensions a way to indicate that they're Unicode compatible, and assume they're not if they don't. Non-compatible extensions will not be loaded and produce an error. ? Zeev