Posted by Matthew Weier O'Phinney on 08/14/05 06:51

* Sebastian <sebastian@broadbandgaming.net> :
> Jochem Maas wrote:
> > if you haven't seen it yet and are interested in the future
> > of php you might be interested in the _big_ thread on php-internals
> > that starts with the message:
> >
> > http://www.manucorp.com/archives/internals/200508/msg00398.php
> >
> > IMHO every halfbaked php coder should read it ;-)
> >
> > to cut it short for those to busy, or what not, Rasmus offered his
> > his vision of php6 (which seems will be the version that will first
> > bring the awesome unicode [and date?] functionality to the masses
> > - hey thats us! :-) ) and there seems to be pretty much unanimous
> > agreement on his main points (lots of discussion on more issues/ideas
> > other people have brung up in response)
> >
> > the future's bright, the future is green.
>
> why php6 and not php5? look how long it took to get to php4 (with php5
> just starting to rolling out) and people are already talking about php6?

My observation was that more people jumped to PHP4 from PHP3 than have
so far from PHP4 to PHP5. And PHP5 has hardly just started to roll out;
the official 5.0.0 release was over a year ago.

> sure it is just a 'versioning' thing, but right now huge numbers of php
> users aren't using php5 (including me) on production environments, let
> alone start talking about php 6.

And why aren't you using PHP5? Is there any specific reason? Is it
because your service provider doesn't offer it? If so, ask them why --
and report it here. As soon as PHP5 hit stable, I started using it, and
I've never looked back. Performance is better, and there are many
features -- exceptions, the new OOP model, autoload, iterators, etc. --
that simply have no analogs in PHP4.

> anyway, i think i will be with php4 for a long time to come.

Please tell the list why -- what does PHP4 offer over PHP5 for you? I
honestly want to know, and I'm sure there are others who would be
interested to see why people are not making the switch.

> kinda of how apache2 hasn't been a real success over apache1.

That's a completely different story. Apache2's internal structure adds
thread support, and since many loadable modules are not necessarily
threadsafe, using them with Apache2 often negatively impact performance
(PHP, for instance, must be run non-threaded because many of the
libraries against which it links are not threadsafe -- and thus running
PHP on Apache2 is much less efficient than on Apache1). The differences
between PHP4 and PH5 are much more trivial, and those people who choose
to use the features of PHP5 are not going to lose performance or
functionality -- actually, quite the opposite.

> i just hope php doesn't end up being bloat-filled with the not-so-useful
> thing just taking up resources.

I think one of the things I like most about PHP is that you can easily
compile it with *only* the features you need -- it only needs as much
bloat as you need to use it.

--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney
Zend Certified Engineer
http://weierophinney.net/matthew/

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