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To: Marcus Boerger <helly@php.net>
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Date: Tue, 01 Jan 2008 18:02:50 +0100
Message-ID: <1199206970.27543.30.camel@johannes.nop>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] spl_autoload vs __autoload
From: johannes@php.net (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

Hi,

On Mon, 2007-12-31 at 22:45 +0100, Marcus Boerger wrote:
> Hello Johannes,
> 
>   I agree with Pierre here. How about finally making SPL built in
> always
>   like ext/standard?

First some statistics: According to my numbers[1], which are as wrong as
most other statistics about such stuff. 1% (36 of 3573) of the PHP 5
installations have SPL disabled. So imo having it not forced-on is not a
big problem for users.

The only ones who might complain about enforcing it are people trying to
run PHP on embedded platforms, but they already have to do some changes
here and there so I don't see that as a problem either.

On the other side, from the internals point of view, I see benefits for
us like that we can rely on SPL Exceptions really being there without
#ifdef'ing around (see ext/mysqlit -> RuntimeException vs. Exception)
and such stuff.

So in the end I'm +1 on the proposal for 5.3.


On a related note: Imo for users the real problems are different
extensions, which we won't enable by default (due to their dependency on
external stuff) and which might be available on some host or different
php.ini settings. For instance I was once annoyed by zlib not being
available on a shared host or png not available for gd. While I know
that it is hard for us to reach these people (and most of us here aren't
interested in shared hosts anyways) that's what I'd like to think about.
Many people try to write apps which run "everywhere" - That's one of the
reasons for PHP's success - but this also means they can only rely on a
limited set of functionality...

johannes

[1] Counting installations of a random PHP app (phpMyFAQ) where the user
agreed to send the data