[PATCH] Tick functions (on C level) with state

This is really interesting, but I think use of "ticks" for asynchronous
functions is bad approach.
A month or two ago I published a PoC for safe interrupt handling.

https://github.com/php/php-src/compare/master...dstogov:interrupt

Actually it's already partially committed to support timeout handling on
Windows.

This idea may be extended to implement cooperative-multitasking,
asynchronous callbacks, signal handlers, etc...
I didn't continue work on it yet, because it's too later for PHP-7.0 and I
have a lot of other PHP-7 related work.

If you like to implement MYSQLI_ASYNC PoC now - just include your ticks
extension there.
If we accept it, we will accept all together.

Thanks. Dmitry.

Hi Dmitry,

Hi Andrey,

I didn't get why do you need this extension and how it's going to be used.

I would like to implement (I have a PoC for this too), asynchronous query
handlers in mysqli@mysqlnd. Currently it is possible to have some
asynchronisity like

$c = mysqli_query("....", MYSQLI_ASYNC);

// do some work
// poll with mysqli_poll

// synchronise with mysqli_reap_async_query

// fetch data

I would like to skip the //poll and in some cases the //synchronise part
and have

$c = mysqli_query("....", MYSQLI_ASYNC,
function () use ($c) {
$res = mysqli_reap_async_query($c);
// do something with the result
}
);

The closure can also set some global flag, and somewhere in the "main"
thread it one can synchronize on it. It can also use [class, method]
callback syntax. For example one can subclass class mysqli, add some status
variables for state, and a method to pass to mysqli_query()/
mysqli::query().

mysqlnd registers a small tick function, that does select, and if there is
data to be read the closure is called. Another closure for handling an
error should be added too (but I don't have it my PoC).

Hope this helps to enlighten my intentions.

Best,
Andrey

Thanks. Dmitry.

On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 4:43 PM, Andrey Hristov <php@hristov.com
mailto:php@hristov.com> wrote:

  Hi,
I would like to hear comments about a small change to the low-level
tick functionality (main/php_ticks.c) to add state to when calling a
C tick function
The patch is alive at : http://pastebin.com/0zhVNxaY

Currently a C tick function gets as a parameter just the number of
ticks, and can't preserve state between calls. On PHP level one can
use closures to mitigate this, but in the C world we don't have this
luxury.

Any comments are very welcome. If possible to get in PHP7.


Cheers,
Andrey