Posted by Colin McKinnon on 09/14/05 22:35

Oli Filth wrote:

> Drazen Gemic wrote:
>> Is there any initiative out there aiming to rewrite PHP
>> extensions in pure PHP ? For example, MySQL driver in
>> pure PHP or LDAP extension in pure PHP ?
>
> Things like database access libraries (and comms protocols like
> sockets, cURL, etc. AFAIK) rely on platform-specific libraries
> deep-down, so there's no way you could could replicate them in pure
> PHP.
>

Nonsense. Most of them can be replicated - in practice it's usually not
really worth the effort. I wrote a class to handle posts to pages - when I
benchmarked it was only slightly slower than using the curl extension
(about 30% slower). This replaced a method where the standalone curl
executable was invoked to carry out a post which was 800% slower.

PHP now has a range of process control functions - it does not have direct
access to the device ioctls you'd need for writing low level hardware
drivers but if you really wanted to do that there's not a lot to stop you
writing your own PECL.

It's interesting that a lot of people are now using PHP outside of
web-browsers 0 indeed, there's at least one web_server_ wirtten in PHP.

C.

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