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To: "Kevin Ingwersen (Ingwie Phoenix)" <ingwie2000@googlemail.com>
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Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 23:11:44 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Casting a PHP type, new SAPI
From: johannes@schlueters.de (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

Hi,

On Tue, 2015-01-20 at 06:36 +0100, Kevin Ingwersen (Ingwie Phoenix)
wrote:
> Today I have started to concept a new SAPI which I have wanted to do
> in quite a while now. To learn more, here is a README:
> https://github.com/IngwiePhoenix/php-jrp/blob/master/README.md
> <https://github.com/IngwiePhoenix/php-jrp/blob/master/README.md>

I have to agree with Bas van Beek that I don't see the benefit of using
a custom protocol over existing ones. This protocol doesn't seem to have
less overhead than HTTP and you loose ability of using established
libraries, debugging tools, scaling tools, ... 

Anyways:

> But in order for me to work this out as good as I can - especially the
> PHP API at the bottom - I need to know just a thing I could not find
> within the public PHP headers: When I have an Array, now can I turn
> that into an object?

What does that mean? Object in PHP-sense or in C-sense or C++-sense or
JSON? They are all different things.

PHP arrays essentially are a zval with a HashTable, which can be used
via zend_hash.h API, there also exist some array_* shortcuts in
zend_API.h, this changes a bit between PHP 5 and 7 so you should pick
the version.

If you want a PHP object you use the object APIs, I tend take ideas from
the reflection's implementation as it does most object things.

If you want the equivalent of  $obj = (object)$array; I question whether
that makes sense (you want to write json output in the end, no? so why
do an relative expensive transformation instead of directly creating
json?) but convert_to_object() in zend_operators.c is your friend.

You want to create a JSON object? Look at the json extension, which
doesn't have an API but is trivial to copy. (mind the license of the
utf8 decoder, if needed)

Unless you have precise questions it's hard to answer expect pointing
out default resources (PHP source, Sara's book,
phpinternalsbook.com, ...)

> I’d be happy to hear what you think of this concept as well. As
> mentioned in the README, process on this will begin later. For now, I
> am going to use helper libraries, but late ron I want to strip the
> project to lesser and lesser dependencies. But it will remain being
> written in C++.

One thing I noticed is that you have a dependency on some thread
libraries (while I wonder why C++08 libraries instead of C++11's thread
support). Using  threads means pain with PHP. One thing is TSRM (while
replaced in PHP 7 with TLS) the other thing is stability: A crash in one
thread will crash the whole server, in a process-based model like
FastCGI or apache mod_prefork only the single process and request will
die. Crashing PHP is trivial (infinite recursion etc.)

I also see PHP-CPP in your dependencies, that is nice but for writing
extensions, not SAPIs. And last time it checked it didn't really do good
under TSRM (haven't checked for some time)

My example I use to answer SAPI questions is
https://github.com/johannes/pconn-sapi which is probably the most simple
SAPI available, working both in threaded and non-threaded mode.

johannes