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Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2016 17:07:12 +0000
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Add PHP_ENGINE Constant
From: me@mprelu.de (Matt Prelude)

Hi,

On 03/02/16 16:54, Dan Ackroyd wrote:
> On 3 February 2016 at 09:03, Davey Shafik <davey@php.net> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> It's actually very difficult to be able to reliably determine that you are
>> running the _real_ PHP runtime and not something mimicking it.
> The underlying problem seems to be caused by HHVM deliberately
> 'faking' the results of calls to zend_version() and the existing
> constants. What is there to stop any other PHP implementations from
> returning 'fake' data for that function or these new constants?
>
> And just to play devils advocate, why isn't this a problem that should
> be solved in those other versions of PHP? They're the ones re-using
> version strings and so causing confusion.
>
> I can see how this could be useful....I just can't see how this would
> be a permanent solution to the problem. As someone else said, this
> sounds like the old detecting browsers via "user agent headers" for
> browser detection. That became a complete nightmare as browsers kept
> imitating each other, and so the rules about strings became less and
> less useful.
>
> Perhaps it might be helpful to justify the RFC, if you can give some
> more context as to why code needs to know about what VM it is running
> on?
>
> cheers
> Dan
>
I think Dan raises some interesting points, although I think 
zend_version() is often used for feature detection so they try to put a 
zend version in there to be helpful i.e. HHVM x.y.z === PHP a.b 
(feature-wise).

I can see how this could be useful. Would get my +1 if I had a vote.