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Date: Sat, 21 May 2011 16:06:42 +0900
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Porting PECL to userspace
From: davidkmuir@gmail.com (David Muir)

On 21/05/11 01:15, Larry Garfield wrote:
> 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.

One reason would be because it requires fixing bugs and implementing
features twice, so it effectively doubles the required work.

>
> 2) Is anyone else doing this?  No sense doing it ourselves if someone
> else already is.

There's a Drupal extension that does something like this, but in reverse:
http://drupal.org/project/drupal_php_ext

Cheers,
David