Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:38351
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain zend.com designates 212.25.124.162 as permitted sender)
Message-ID: <485922F9.7070806@zend.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2008 08:00:09 -0700
Organization: Zend Technologies
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Christian Seiler <chris_se@gmx.net>
CC: Lars Strojny <lars@strojny.net>, Marcus Boerger <helly@php.net>, 
 Johannes Schlueter <johannes@schlueters.de>,
 php-dev List <internals@lists.php.net>
References: <4856A547.3080801@gmx.net>	 <1961603263.20080617120320@marcus-boerger.de> <4857ACE1.3050501@gmx.net>	 <1178748433.20080617211038@marcus-boerger.de>  <48580E5C.9090100@zend.com> <1213732325.21878.9.camel@localhost> <485821D6.7020604@gmx.net>
In-Reply-To: <485821D6.7020604@gmx.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [PATCH] [RFC] Closures and lambda functions in PHP
From: stas@zend.com (Stanislav Malyshev)

Hi!
> First: My patch is quite non-intrusive, it only adds things in a few
> places (new opcode, a few checks). If you only look at the non-generated

I think it falls into "famous last words" category. While I did not have 
time yet to look into the patch in the detail, I have hard time to 
believe patch creating wholly new concept in PHP, new opcodes, etc. 
would have zero impact. You have to consider at least the following: 
tests, documentation, how lexical interacts with other references 
(global? static? just variable passed by-ref?), how closure interacts 
with various reflection capabilities, how it works with bytecode caches, 
what happens with lifetimes of the variables saved in closures - 
especially implicit ones like $this, etc., etc. I know these questions 
can be answered, and maybe even easily answered, but I think they have 
to be answered without pressure of 5.3 release and commitment to the 
fixed API hanging over us.

I understand your urge to have it inside ASAP - if you didn't want it, 
you'd not gone through this effort to create it :) However, I still 
think we better not make 5.3 dependent on yet another new feature.
As for adoption - I think it would take a long time for off-the-shelf 
libraries and mainstream users to use this anyway, and for the hackers 
among us it will be available in development version pretty soon after 
5.3. I think if we would decide that every new feature anybody can think 
about should enter into 5.3 because it will be harder to adopt it 
otherwise, we'd never release 5.3 at all - look at the RFCs, we have a 
bunch of ideas already, and I'm sure there will be more. We need to 
release some time - what happened to that "release often" thing?

Please do not consider this to be opinion about (or against) the patch - 
I think the idea is good and from preliminary glance the implementation 
is very nice too, but IMHO we just can not have everything in one release.
-- 
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas@zend.com   http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829   MSN: stas@zend.com