[PHP4BETA] Modularization and Thread Safety

First, Stig - great job! With all of the modifications we've made in PHP 4.0 (your directory restructure and automake/autoconf work, the way each module takes care after its own globals and INI entries) it really doesn't seem far before loadable modules are as easy to use as built-in ones. Is there still serious work pending on this front? About thread safety, in the last three days I worked a lot on getting thread safety working again, and improved it. I've pretty much finished my thread-safe resource manager, which is loosely based on Shane's idea (it's pretty much a very quick implementation, that features a bit more functionality). So far, a single threaded thread-safe php.exe runs through just as reliably as the thread-unsafe one. The thread safe resource manager sorts out the basic problems we've bumped into with TLS. It allocates the necessary thread local storage just-in-time; Optionally initializes it using a constructor function; Optionally destroyes it using a destructor function; works fine from within DLLs; and completely portable You can get a good example as to how to work with this thread safe resource manager (tsrm) by looking the the MySQL module - look at the definitions in php3_mysql.h (look for ZTS), and the mysql.c source. You can check out tsrm from :pserver:cvs.zend.com:/repository/TSRM. Also, for those of you who were involved in the PHP 3.1 thread safety effort, you may recall that an annoying problem was the fact that flex-generated scanners are not reentrant and not thread safe, and fixing that required actually patching flex.exe itself. Zend's design made it a hell of a lot easier, or at all feasible, to use Flex's C++ scanner class. Yesterday, I've successfully modified Zend to compile the scanner as a C++ class when compiling for thread safety, and a standalone scanner object is usef for every scanning job. It ended up being very efficient (no TLS lookups) and very very clean. The thread unsafe project compiles the scanner as a regular C scanner. By the way, as you probably understood, we've decided that a C++ compiler would be absolutely necessary to compile libzend as a thread safe library. Zeev -- ----------------------------------------------------- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> For a PGP public key, finger bourbon@netvision.net.il -- PHP 4 Beta