[wp-hackers] Visual Rich Editor in Comments

[Robert Deaton]

On 3/12/07, Computer Guru <computerguru at neosmart.net> wrote:
> Every time I get on Slashdot or Digg I have to spend a month swearing at the
> folks at PHP. They're powering the most popular sites on the net, yet they
> absolutely refuse to address stability issues on IIS/Windows.
>
> I choose to use IIS. True, I can switch to Apache, but I like IIS, and it
> works great (even under load) with ASP.NET, Python, Perl, and more. But PHP
> thinks that Linux is the only option, and have for months now "been aware"
> of "certain instability issues on Windows" but refuse to address them.

<snip>

> Oh, I agree - that's why I've always just accepted that PHP runs better on LAMP. But the question is, what's a valid distance between first and second priority? At what point does second priority become not a priority at all (as seems to be the case now).

Actually, the folks at the PHP team have tried to address issues, but
constantly come under build issues and compiler limitations on
Windows. It has taken a partnership with Microsoft to get the new IIS7
stuff together, which is still far from perfect.

To put many of the windows/IIS issues in a nutshell, PHP from the
start was not designed to be thread-safe. It was designed on OSes
where starting new processes isn't a performance sinkhole for the OS,
like it is in windows. PHP has thus had to rework the engine and all
the code, all the extensions, to be thread safe. This makes PHP slower
and much more tedious to code, and the engine is probably still
suffering from issues with thread safety because it was not written to
be thread-safe. Having to write with thread safety in mind for PHP
extensions is a royal pain in the rear end, all because CGI is slow
and IIS until the upcoming version has not had support for FastCGI.

So, the issue is not really a matter of priorities, its a matter of
who wants to go through and spend hours tracking down thread safety
issues remnant of years ago for a platform that most of the engine and
core developers don't and won't use?

-- 
--Robert Deaton
http://lushlab.com