Re: Porting PECL to userspace

On 21/05/11 01:15, Larry Garfield wrote: > Hi all. > > I'm working with a fellow developer on an experimental project. There > are some PECL modules that we want to try and use in an open source > project where we cannot guarantee that PECL modules will be available, > since it's intended for widespread distribution on both shared hosts > and custom hosting. The thought we had was to do a user-space port of > the PECL module to include in the project and rely on that. Then if > the PECL module is installed, we don't include the library (either via > an extension_loaded() check or just relying on autoload) and the PECL > implementation gets used instead. Poof, nice speed boost. > > The questions I have are: > > 1) Is this even a viable approach? It seems like it, but to my > knowledge no one else has done this to any serious extent which makes > me wonder if there's a reason the road less traveled is less traveled. One reason would be because it requires fixing bugs and implementing features twice, so it effectively doubles the required work. > > 2) Is anyone else doing this? No sense doing it ourselves if someone > else already is. There's a Drupal extension that does something like this, but in reverse: http://drupal.org/project/drupal_php_ext Cheers, David