Re: RFC: Removing the Zend API

Hi, On Wed, 2009-04-01 at 16:16 +0100, Paul Biggar wrote: > I think that to handle more complex cases we need the kind of > information which makes it straightforward to easily generate code to > make a seamless interface between C and the engine API. The only case > I had thought of was to somehow mangle structs/pointers into > resources. But I suppose we need lengths for strings. I expect (many?) > more of these cases will come up. Well, as soon as any pointer exists you need manual work for a special case. And even when only using integers it's not fully fast-forward: There are cases where not the full integer range is allowed but just a few flags or some specific range. C programmers will know that, passing that 1:1 to PHP userland can be bad. For simple cases http://pecl.php.net/package/ffi might be enough, for average cases there are just a few APIs (PHP_FUNCTION, zend_parse_parameters, RETURN_*) one has to know for a start for an extensions, Hartmut's CodeGen_PECL abstracts that using some XML and then there's PEAR's Inline_C as some "weird" approach. I'd be happy to have some simple toolkit for this, but I guess it's really hard to make some easy tool which really works in average cases not just in proof-of-concept cases. This might also be interesting for other projects like ProjectZero (PHP using a JVM) or pipp (using Parrot) johannes