Re: Fwd: What's up with Quercus?

On May 28, 2011, at 10:55 PM, Martin Scotta wrote: > I really dont like to move away from PHP, but compared to others... it's > just a template language with steroids. > > and please dont get me wrong, I love PHP, it's is still my favourite but... This has been exactly my experience when trying to use PHP in any meaningful way. For example, trying to use PHP as a network server: - I immediately had to write an extension to give me access to several missing APIs (clock_gettime() and a number of ncurses functions not implemented in the ncurses extension). - In order to use stream_select() with both network sockets and STDIN, I had to merge socket_select() with stream_select() in my extension, as in 5.3 stream_select() doesn't preserve socket array keys (this was fixed in 5.4) - To make use of pack() and unpack() for packet management, I had to reimplement them so as not to throw notices willy-nilly when I got bad packets. (Adding format specifiers that could handle useful data types not in the original API was just a bonus.) - In general, I have to tiptoe all over everything to avoid getting useless notices/warnings for expected error conditions (such as SIGPIPE on dying sockets, passing zero sockets to stream_select(), trying to fopen() a nonexistant file, and so forth). - No threading support. - No preprocessor. define() makes up for only some of it, closures make up for some more, but still not enough. There are no mature opensource preprocessor implementations for PHP that I can find (just betas of various sorts), and both GCC's and Clang's CPPs break on here/nowdocs. More generic preprocessors (like m4) tend to have learning curves or problems of their own. - (Almost) everything here: http://www.phpsadness.com/ - No Unicode. If there is any direction for PHP 6, I'd like to see that direction be dealing with problems like these. PHP has been used more and more as a general-purpose language, when it wasn't designed to be. Addressing that would solve a lot of core problems. And yes, it does mean an engine rewrite. -- Gwynne