Re: design of forum applications

On Thursday, May 15, 2003, at 03:12 PM, Hans Lellelid wrote:

| I strongly disagree with that point, I do not believe that | something which is properly designed should be slow. In fact, | proper implementation would not only satisfy stylistic | concerns but also performance concerns. Bloat is by no | definition of the word a good design. I didn't say bloat = good design at all; what I said though, is that writing a well-architected script is going to be slower. I'm not talking about avoiding bloat or simply writing code with speed in mind -- those are givens IMO. I may be using a definition of "well-architected" that you may not agree with: specifically, abstract, tiered application design. Creating abstract code is simply going to run slow in PHP -- function calls and object instantiation carry a significant performance price. And when you factor in things like template parsing, db abstraction, etc. you have additional overhead that wouldn't be "necessary" in a fast-n-dirty PHP script.

Well, if you have a truly generalized and 'well-architected' solution that is suitable for many uses, then it would be both beneficial and practical to recode all of it's core components in C/C++. In PHP you have a triangle of performance, usability and maintainability. You can often have any two of those you want. George