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Date: Wed, 28 May 2014 15:34:22 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] about the latest frontpage entry
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

Ferenc Kovacs wrote (on 28/05/2014):
> I'm mostly interested on the opinion of the core devs, but others also
> welcome to reply.
>

I'm definitely in the category of "others", but I thought I'd try my 
hand at a replacement wording:


> While rarely visible to users, there are many people working behind 
> the scenes to improve PHP, both to bring new features and to increase 
> performance.
>
> Recently, a project known internally as "phpng" has gained some 
> attention outside the normal channels; this is an experimental branch 
> of the codebase, initially authored by Dmitry Stogov, Xinchen Hui, and 
> Nikita Popov, which cleans up and alters some internal APIs to improve 
> performance, particularly in terms of memory usage. The hope is that a 
> change such as this may pave the way for further improvements in the 
> future, such as a "JIT" capable executor, but the current branch does 
> not include such a change.
>
> However, the branch does give a considerable performance gain in real 
> world applications, for example a 20% increase in throughput for a 
> typical Wordpress setup. It is possible that this branch, or something 
> like it, may form one part of the next major release of PHP (hence the 
> optimistic "Next Generation" label of the branch), and discussions are 
> continuing around what that release should look like and what 
> timescales will be involved in bringing it to production quality.


I'm not sure whether or not it makes sense to include a link to the RFC, 
or a pointer to check the mailing list - if so, it should probably be 
stressed that the details are highly technical in nature, and require a 
certain prior knowledge of the engine.

Just a thought, to move things forward. :)
-- 
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]