Re: Is it possible introduce HHVM into PHP kernel tree?

Andrea Faulds wrote (on 03/01/2014):

On 03/01/14 06:20, Pierre Joye wrote:

While it is very appealing there are many reasons to do not even consider it as this stage: . CLA and only controlled by one single company. We had the single company control of our engine in the past, it did UA no good. . barely portable, relies on gcc only . will reduce even more the amount of contributors able to participate in the engine development (due to technical, legal or related reasons.

It's my understanding that HHVM is incomplete, as well. Does HHVM implement the full basic functionality of PHP? Are there still things which don't work for performance reasons?

It occurs to me that an interesting direction to consider would be moving towards having a PHP language specification, rather than a single reference implementation. Then both the Zend Engine (as distributed by PHP.net) and HHVM could be implementations of that language specification, with documented limitations / deviations. Such a specification might also be useful in other ways - for instance, cross-checking with unit tests and documentation, and establishing clear baselines when discussing RFCs and maintaining (or not) compatibility between releases. Obviously, though, this would require the folks in charge of both implementations to be interested enough in the project to spend time on it. Just a thought... -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]