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Subject: Porting PECL to userspace
From: larry@garfieldtech.com (Larry Garfield)

Hi all.

I'm working with a fellow developer on an experimental project.  There 
are some PECL modules that we want to try and use in an open source 
project where we cannot guarantee that PECL modules will be available, 
since it's intended for widespread distribution on both shared hosts and 
custom hosting. The thought we had was to do a user-space port of the 
PECL module to include in the project and rely on that.  Then if the 
PECL module is installed, we don't include the library (either via an 
extension_loaded() check or just relying on autoload) and the PECL 
implementation gets used instead.  Poof, nice speed boost.

The questions I have are:

1) Is this even a viable approach?  It seems like it, but to my 
knowledge no one else has done this to any serious extent which makes me 
wonder if there's a reason the road less traveled is less traveled.

2) Is anyone else doing this?  No sense doing it ourselves if someone 
else already is.

3) What would be the cleanest way to do so?  We had the thought of 
partially automating the process by having PHP auto-generate at the very 
least the subs of any classes and functions that the module provides.  
However, when my colleague tried using the same parser as is used for 
generating documentation he says he got several times as many classes as 
the manual says the module has.  We were using the PECL HTTP module as 
our sample (http://www.php.net/http).  (I don't know the exact details 
of what he did at the moment.)  Is that not a viable approach?  Would we 
be better off using reflection?  Is there some other tool we're not 
aware of?

If viable I'd love if this would start a trend, but we'll see where it 
goes.  I know it wouldn't work for all PECL modules, obviously, but I 
suspect it could work for several, and provide an easy way for different 
PHP projects to share backend code without needing lots of C developers.

--Larry Garfield