Newsgroups: php.internals Path: news.php.net Xref: news.php.net php.internals:103634 Return-Path: Delivered-To: mailing list internals@lists.php.net Received: (qmail 81127 invoked from network); 24 Dec 2018 20:07:06 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO localhost.localdomain) (76.75.200.58) by pb1.pair.com with SMTP; 24 Dec 2018 20:07:06 -0000 To: internals@lists.php.net References: Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2018 12:37:27 -0400 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.3.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Posted-By: 66.50.50.95 Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] [VOTE] FFI - Foreign Function Interface From: jgmdev@gmail.com (Jefferson Gonzalez) Message-ID: Is sad to see people voting against this feature, which would help move PHP into territories outside of the web development landscape. For those developers not interested in learning the zend engine (lack of time) but with enough knowledge about C, this extension would surely help a lot when in need of writing a php cli application that needs access to some C library. This would further help move PHP into the general purpose scripting language arena which is currently dominated by Python and others. And I know many people have this mindset of "use the right tool for the job" but, actually a programming language is already a set of tools, so why buy a fully brand new tool set when you can clearly extend the existing one by adding the missing pieces. Can people explain why they are voting no to a feature that seems really well put and thought? Without disrespecting anyone but, in my opinion seems to me like a lack of vision. I think that shipping this extension as part of the 7.4 release would be an opportunity for people to easily test it before the JIT/8.0 milestone is reached, giving people with time the opportunity to start writing stuff that then would be optimized(more practical) when JIT/8.0 lands, heck, this implementation is even faster than Python one and you can still find lots of stuff on the Python world that uses FFI... I just hope such a feature which is a core part of most scripting languages is not kept as just an optional and forgotten pecl option.