Posted by Oli Filth on 09/14/05 22:50

Colin McKinnon said the following on 14/09/2005 20:35:
> 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 guess it depends how you interpret "pure PHP". I would hazard a guess
that with no extensions at all (i.e. literally just PHP language
constructs), then it's not possible, as cURL functionality etc. still
relies on sockets, which rely on low-level drivers.

> 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.

Well, clearly, but that doesn't really fall in line with the OP's
original question about pure PHP functionality (i.e. not using
extensions), without involving any other languages, etc.


--
Oli

[Back to original message]