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To: "Paul Biggar" <paul.biggar@gmail.com>,
	"PHP Internals" <internals@lists.php.net>
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Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:23:43 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RFC: Removing the Zend API
From: nlopess@php.net ("Nuno Lopes")

Hi Paul et all,

I fully understand (and even share) your motivations and goals. However it 
seems to me that describing an extension in PHP will lead to loss of 
performance, as you cannot capture certain C features in PHP. For example, 
there are some internal functions that rely on pointer arithmetic to get 
decent performance.
Then you may extend to PHP to better capture these "dirty tricks", and then 
you'll end up with some DSL for building PHP extensions. It's not 
necessarily bad, it's just a lot of work.. :)
Moreover, in your example in the wiki you don't include how you would do 
parameter parsing. Or do you rely on the code generator to look at the C 
functions signatures and figure out by itself what to do? (actually there is 
some ambiguity, AFAIR, and thus guessing cannot be done reliably)

To summarize my e-mail, I believe this is a very interesting idea, but needs 
a lot more thinking :)  It's a nice SoC project nethertheless.

Nuno

----- Original Message -----
> Hi,
>
> I've added a new RFC to the wiki
> (http://wiki.php.net/rfc/remove_zend_api). It details a plan to try
> and decouple the Zend engine from the libraries, in order to allow
> large scale changes to the Zend engine in the future. The RFC
> describes a prototype phase of the project, which could reasonably be
> done within a GSOC project, so I have added it to the GSOC 09 page
> (http://wiki.php.net/gsoc/2009#prototyping_removal_of_the_zend_api).
>
> If anybody has any comments, I'd be delighted to hear them. If anybody
> knows (or is) a good student looking for a GSOC project (and I've left
> it late, there are only 3 days left to apply), please encourage the
> student to look at this. Finally, if anybody is interested in helping
> mentor this as part of the GSOC, I'd be grateful for the help (I have
> to start writing my thesis soon).
>
> Thanks,
> Paul