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Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 23:28:38 -0300
Message-ID: <CADK1yXL2_Rqdj=FgVwG8ydT5iyh8PAvw0meDjVEVMXsLt9k-Ow@mail.gmail.com>
To: Lanre Waju <lanre@online-presence.ca>
Cc: "internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Why did fibers get added to php core over something
 more fleshed out like swoole?
From: deleugyn@gmail.com (Deleu)

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On Thu, Oct 12, 2023 at 10:00=E2=80=AFPM Lanre Waju <lanre@online-presence.=
ca>
wrote:

> I find it puzzling that the PHP internals have chosen to delegate this
> specific functionality to userspace implementation. Fibers, in my view,
> seem somewhat limited without the addition of a third-party library or,
> at the very least, the necessity to implement an event loop in userland.
> This raises questions, as it effectively obliges users to rely on
> third-party libraries to handle a fundamental feature rather than
> incorporating it into the core of PHP.
>

Seems like your description here quite matches what the goal/aim for Fibers
initially was; a low-level API to help userland libraries to build async
PHP code.


> Moreover, I'm curious about why PHPDBG doesn't implement the Language
> Server Protocol (LSP). Could it be due to its reliance on Xdebug? I came
> across this discussion on https://externals.io/message/78456, which
> makes me wonder about the decision-making process within PHP internals.
> It sometimes seems as though certain choices may not align with the best
> interests of the PHP community. I would appreciate it if you could
> provide insights into why this might not be the case.
>
>
> Lanre
>

My personal, non-fact-checked guesswork about the current state is that PHP
had a significant history of decisions that made future work on the
language harder. As time passed and the language had more and more features
naturally the project becomes harder to maintain and navigate, which
affected how future decisions were made. The BC promise of PHP has always
been significantly high - some edge cases and significant BC breaks have
happened, but they're not the norm. Naturally the next step in this history
is to become more conservative. Userland libraries can have faster release
cadence, requires PHP maintainers (bigger pool than C maintainers) and
breaking changes are a lesser problem to a certain extent. Discussions
around language evolution, editions, etc has happened as (among other
things) a possibility to make BC breaks less impactful to the world wide
web and lower the barrier in getting an RFC approved, but these discussions
never led to a concrete implementation.

As it currently stands, PHP is a solid language with stable and proven APIs
with Composer and Community packages covering the gap in consistency,
technology evolution and developer experience. I'm a big advocate for
having some language changes that makes common and fundamental use-cases
part of the language i.e. it's quite unfortunate that a 30 year old
language that powers the World Wide Web don't have a Request object, but
history has made PHP quite conservative and there hasn't been a significant
change that invalidates the reason to be conservative yet. On top of that,
some voters are extra conservative when the topic is added DX built-in to
the language, specially because DX can be subjective (see multi-line arrow
function).

Long story short, Fibers being something "incomplete" from a userland
perspective is a feature, not a bug. Look at it as the simplest, smallest
(while still being feature-complete) way to expose the ability to write
async code in PHP while Swoole is almost an ecosystem on its own.


--=20
Marco Deleu

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