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Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2014 12:11:24 -0700
Message-ID: <CAFMT4NqGrQ9RhgzOZ_SisimE67=3fWJoPX0HR2nixfRu9a3nSQ@mail.gmail.com>
To: Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me>
Cc: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com>, internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Is it possible introduce HHVM into PHP kernel tree?
From: morrison.levi@gmail.com (Levi Morrison)

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On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 9:36 AM, Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me> wrote:
>
> On 03/01/14 16:31, Rowan Collins wrote:
>>
>> It occurs to me that an interesting direction to consider would be
>> moving towards having a PHP language specification, rather than a single
>> reference implementation. Then both the Zend Engine (as distributed by
>> PHP.net) and HHVM could be implementations of that language
>> specification, with documented limitations / deviations.
>>
>> Such a specification might also be useful in other ways - for instance,
>> cross-checking with unit tests and documentation, and establishing clear
>> baselines when discussing RFCs and maintaining (or not) compatibility
>> between releases.
>>
>> Obviously, though, this would require the folks in charge of both
>> implementations to be interested enough in the project to spend time on
>> it.
>>
>> Just a thought...
>>
>
> It's something I'd definitely like to see, and is perhaps something the
> long-awaited PHP 6 could have. One of PHP's big problems is the fact that
> there is no real specification whatsoever, only the single Zend
> implementation. Of course, this presents a problem in specifying PHP's
> behaviour, as the result would likely be "do exactly what the Zend engine
> does". Perhaps we'd discover things in Zend which don't work the way
> they're supposed to, mind.


I'd personally like to see a PHP language specification as well. With a
spec in mind, it would be much easier to create more implementations and
competition can be quite healthy for a product. I'm not going to pretend
that a spec alone would make PHP better as a whole; it would also require a
lot of work that initially doesn't help anyone. In the long-term though, I
think it would help PHP and that's why I'd support it.

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