On 10 September 2024 19:32:19 BST, Mike Schinkel <[email protected]> wrote:
>BTW, why has nobody ever mentioned Zephir on this list (that I am aware of?)
Zephir is an interesting idea that has never quite fulfilled its aims. The Phalcon developers hoped
that creating a more PHP-like language would allow more people to work on extensions such as their
framework, but it doesn't seem to have worked out that way.
The worse problem was that Zephir itself had very few contributors. A few years ago, the project
came close to shutting down as there was nobody left to maintain it; Phalcon was to be rewritten in
PHP. <https://blog.phalcon.io/post/the-future-of-phalcon>
Since then, somebody has stepped up, but Phalcon work is still focussed on the PHP rewrite, with the
intention of a smaller, optional, extension providing performance-critical components. <https://blog.phalcon.io/post/phalcon-roadmap>
Meanwhile, PHP 7 and 8 have massively increased both the performance and the capability of code
written in PHP, and even FFI to bridge to existing native binaries (although I gather there's a
lot that could be improved to make that more useful).
The overall trend is to have only what's absolutely necessary in an extension, and there have
even been suggestions that some built-in functions would be better off implemented in PHP itself, if
the right low-level features were included.
All of which is drifting a long way off topic, except to say that I think we should be aiming to
reduce the difference between what can be done in extensions and what in PHP code, rather than
planning any new such differences.
Regards,
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]