Re: Concerning Thies's and Sterling's "Hack"

From:	Andi Gutmans	Date:	Tue, 26 Aug 2003 05:03:17 +0000
Subject:	Re: Concerning Thies's and Sterling's "Hack"
References:	1 2 3 4 5	Groups:	php.internals
Request:	Send a blank email to internals+get-4187@lists.php.net to get a copy of this message

At 06:41 PM 8/25/2003 -0700, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Sascha Schumann wrote: On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
It would also have to be a new 4.4 branch as it breaks binary compatibility for extensions.
    It is far from being usable in mainstream as it relies on various
    GCC features in many places.  Of course, using portable C is
    a requirement for being accepted into the repository.  I
    suppose the patch authors are aware of that which is why they
    have not come forward yet.
As long as there are appropriate checks and fallbacks, I see no problem using compiler-specific hacks. Especially in cases where it would benefit a large percentage of users.

I agree with Sascha. I actually did this patch on my own a few months ago and didn't feel that the performance improvement was good enough to make the code quite a bit less maintainable. It also makes execute() uglier because you need an entry point into execute to retrieve the addresses. In any case, it doesn't fit into the PHP 5 architecture of using a function call per-opcode. Some of their other patches are nice and I will look into them. Andi