If there's an overwhelming support for removing the switch then I guess that's where it is. I still think it's a mistake and we are risking a big split in the user base going forward but time will tell. Long term PHP may not recover from that split unless we truly manage to help the most popular PHP applications to make the leap. They have been some of the biggest drivers behind PHP adoption, probably just as much as the technology itself.
The burden of maintenance will definitely be higher. Right now we have to identify what features we think need back porting to PHP 5.3 which in my opinion looses a lot of good energy which could go into futures but that's where we're at. The PHP 5 user-base is strong, and growing and will require a lot of these features. I still think that the community and internals@ should still invest significantly in making migration as easy as possible and making clear what the performance attributes are. As I said, I'll be more than happy to pitch in when the time comes in running benchmarks and trying to figure out if a good migration methodology/scripts can be done. There are also some backporting of features which may make it easier for people to do a slower migration like (binary) cast (would be a no-op) and some other things. Still need to think about this further but there may be some things that can help. Andi > -----Original Message----- > From: Lukas Kahwe Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2007 7:26 AM > To: Andi Gutmans > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; internals@lists.php.net > Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] What is the use of "unicode.semantics" in PHP 6? > > Hi, > > Ok, so I think its becoming clear that BC is not the main issue we will > be addressing with the unicode switch. I know Zeev's mantra that BC is > not binary, but from the people that have posted feedback on the topic > from actual experience it seems that making code work on PHP5 (and even > PHP4) as well as PHP6 is possible with a bit of work, but without a > rewrite. > > So at this point the main argument can only resolve around performance. > So the question is how much performance does a user gain by turning of > unicode in PHP6. We might be able to figure this out without porting an > actual application. Maybe with a few synthetic benchmarks, along with > some code analysis (maybe for 3 different categories of applications: > data processing intensive, web blog, database heavy application)) of > how > often particularily slow functions are called in an average > application, > we could extrapolate a ball park figure of what kind of slow down to > expect. > > regards, > Lukas -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
