Re: PHP6 thoughts about Engine changes

Hi! > However you are right. I have the feeling that this list is very > optimistic, but a couple of things should be considered (jit f.e. > and APIs cleanup for example). I think if we want the next major happen on reasonable timeframe, we should be extremely wary of "rewrite everything" wishlist items, especially ones without somebody making very strong commitment at actually seeing them through (and note that rewriting API means that code depending on the API should be redone too). Whatever is one's estimate of how much work would such thing require, it's usually order of magnitude or more off, and not to the good side, when you're touching deep infrastructure things. So I think we need to separate "pie in the sky" items from items that we have an idea where to go with them and items that would produce real improvement visible for users. As an example, most users wouldn't care much about hooks in the optimizer or how exactly source code is parsed, but would care a lot if we got named params support or Unicode support. I'm not saying we shouldn't do the former, just to separate lists into user and non-user part and be realistic about how hard some of these are, and prioritize the user part. I think if we try to bite off too much we've end up where Unicode effort ended - a lot of work ending up in achieving nothing. I think we need to have a plan of something that can realistically be done in, say, a year or two, and that makes common users (ones that don't care how exactly our parsing library is called but have thousands upon thousands of lines of code to upgrade and thousands of developers to adopt it) be eager to buy into it, something that makes their lives immediately better and worth the pain of the upgrade. -- Stanislav Malyshev, Software Architect SugarCRM: http://www.sugarcrm.com/ (408)454-6900 ext. 227