On 14/02/2023 15:32, Thomas Hruska wrote:
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for your effort on this, I think efficient string handling functions would be a major help for the ecosystem, allowing library authors to do things in plain PHP code which currently defer to C extensions just for performance.
My first thought opening the RFC was to see a function signature with 9 arguments and immediately wonder how to refactor it into something more manageable. Just writing *tests* for all the combinations sounds like a nightmare, let alone understanding code that uses them all.
As I read through, I had a similar feeling about the need to copy-and-paste the same two parameters onto so many functions.
Luckily, I think the RFC contains the seed of the solution to both problems: what you refer to as "virtual buffers". These seem to be crying out to be a new data type, with their own API - probably using OO style, given general fashions.
Framed around that, I think we can split out a few different concerns:
* Methods to take a string, and make a new, writeable buffer pointing at all or part of it
* Methods to access parts of a buffer, as a string or another buffer
* Methods to efficiently write to, delete from, or overwrite, parts of a buffer
* Methods to explicitly manage the memory used by the buffer
* Finally, support for writing to, or reading from, a buffer instead of a string in a number of existing functions
Thinking about exactly what those methods should look like leads me to my next thought: we should be learning from prior art here. Are there other languages which already do this well, which PHP could emulate? Are there other languages which already do this *badly*, whose mistakes PHP could explicitly learn from?
What comes to my mind immediately is that both Java and C# have "StringBuilder" classes, which cover at least some of these use cases. C#, in particular, had a lot of very smart people paid to design it, able to learn from mistakes Java had already made.
Regards,
--
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]