[wp-hackers] WordPress PHP Extension

[Jacob]

Midgard[1] has it, ADODB has it, why not WordPress[2]? I suppose, this 
is better split in two parts.

The first part is the question of whether anyone has explored this for 
WordPress before. If so, how did they fare? There are a few challenges 
of building and maintaining a PHP Extension that requires constant 
maintenance. If anyone has known of anyone doing so, can they let me know?

The obvious answer of why there isn't one, is because WordPress 
development is constantly evolving and keeping up with even a small team 
would be difficult. How the two projects above handled it was to take 
the most time consuming parts and place them in C/C++ code and call 
those functions, if they exist, where needed.

It is not impossible to translate PHP code to C/C++, even with MySQL 
connections intact. There are two ways to go about it. However, if you 
are going to develop an optimized, you'll want to hook into PDO or the 
underlying API that the MySQL extension itself uses to push it that much 
further.

It really goes beyond Opcode Caching to a realm slightly faster than 
that. Having access to the underlying C/C++ code allows for usage of 
quicker structures than Hashes.

I thought about it. Just a thought really. Would anyone be interested in 
this exercise in entertainment (building PHP extensions is fun, honest)? 
Thought I would ping the hackers to see what your opinion is on the 
matter. Really, I wouldn't have thought about it, if it wasn't the 
discussion on optimizing the Plugin API (still have to submit that 
updated patch).

[1] http://www.midgard-project.org/

[2] The main setback would be that not many users has access to 
compiling PHP (or know how to compile PHP), therefore the audience of 
such an specialized Extension would be small.

-- 

Jacob Santos

http://www.santosj.name - blog
http://wordpress.svn.dragonu.net/unittest/ - unofficial WP unit test suite.

Also known as darkdragon and santosj on WP trac.