On Wed, 2013-09-11 at 12:44 +0200, Florin Patan wrote:
> - having a RFC to make a language change requires to have a patch
> which if you don't know C and internals you got no chance of doing.
Well, so what should happen? An RFC without patch is accepted and then?
Somebody has to write a patch at some time. Whom of the people spending
their free time do you want to force to do that even though they might
not be interested in the feature?
Getting a patch first
* proves feasibility (yes, I love saying "It's just software
everything is possible" ... but then there's always a "BUT")
* shows technical consequences of a feature
* shows that there is somebody who is interested in developing AND
probably maintaining the patch (if somebody with a good idea can
not convince a single developer how will this be maintained?)
* allows users to actually test a feature and find problems which
might not be that obvious from theoretical examples
Yes writing a good patch can be lots of effort, and it might be dumped,
but for most features the initial patches aren't that big.
> And if you do know C, PHP internals will drain the soul out of you
> before doing something
Comparing PHP with other C projects I've seen the code isn't as bad as
many people make it sound. Sure we have some "weird" macros, but for
many of those: What's the alternative? (C++11 would allow some
improvements here and there but create a whole lot of other issues) Sure
we have some creepy areas: That happens, when a project grows over more
than 15 years, when sometimes not so good developers add things,
sometimes people try to optimise things for performance and often try to
keep a good BC story (even on internal APIs) But overall PHP is a
modular quite structured code base.
> - there were patches proposed by Facebook, and others, that are / were
> rejected, delayed or ignored. Who heard of Facebook anyway, they have
> just one website with a billion users probably running on a a couple
> of Galaxy Note 3 and 2-3 iPhone 6 as a load balancers, my cat can do
> better I tell you.
Facebook has active contributors who can push anything and know most
"core" people well enough. If anything they want is falling under the
floor they probably don't want it that much. Also mind: Facebook is
*one* usecase. Not everything which is good for them is necissarily good
for other users. And we have a multitude of users. Some want afast and
slick platform, some want many advanced features, some want it to be
simple. What we have to do is to find the "right" line ... oh, and mind
they are not using PHP but hipHop.
> Where Zend | The PHP Company? It's their name, no? They are making
> money out of PHP brand, certifications and training?
So can you. So do others.
> They've added the opcode cache and that was the single biggest thing
> they've did in 7 years? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
They are active in fixing bugs and improving the performance and other
things. Sure they are not propose many new features but maybe (I'm an
outsider and can only speculate) they have noticed that with a fast
enough platform offering lots of language features you don't have to do
all things in the core but can build the environment around the core
language by building frameworks and tools and benefit the platform more
in that way. (while also making it simpler to develop and ease
participation as each framework user should now PHP and can therefore
help with the framework) but having said that: Ask Zend, not this list,
if you want something from Zend.
This all said: I agree that some structures here are bad and might be
improved but mind one thing: This community is quite open (everybody can
subscribe to this list and participate, and often git accounts are
thrown out relatively fast) which leads to a quite heterogeneous field
of people all having different interests and aims (as I mentioned above
already), you criticize this as "missing vision", one can see the same
thing as "too many independent visions" - everybody here has a reason
and goal of some kind for his/her contributions. Aligning them all the
time is tough and requires compromises. Constantly. But you won't find a
single vision which a majority would support and which wouldn't drive
too many contributors away while still deserving to be called a vision.
johannes
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