Re: ext/gd: support creation of animated GIFs

On 09.01.2017 at 21:21, Andrea Faulds wrote: > Joe Watkins wrote: > >> We have to face facts: Resources are still a thing. >> >> While there is talk of switching resources to use opaque objects, I'm >> worried about introducing a mixture of objects and resources in random >> places throughout core exts, and having exts with both seems very strange >> to me. ACK. >> I know that this has already started to happen, but before it goes any >> further I would implore you to stick to resources for now. > > The more things are made objects now, the less things need to be > converted to be objects later. ACK. > It might be “strange” to mix them, but would it actually cause > confusion? So far as the user cares, resources and objects returned by > Gd could just be integers. They're just opaque handles. I think that they *should* be opaque handles, but you never know how one's going to treat them. Presumably the most crucial point nowadays are type declarations; changing a resource to be an object could cause massive BC break (think of streams) – changing all resources to objects appears to be even impracticable for a major version. Therefore I think this has to be done in small steps ("eating the elephpant one bite at a time"), and so introducing new opaque handles as objects appears somewhat sensible even if that causes a mix of resources and objects in a single extension. Anyhow, I understand that the animated GIF support will need an RFC, and there should be a secondary voting option whether the API should use a resource or an opaque object. -- Christoph M. Becker