On Tue, 2013-08-20 at 17:17 +0100, Terry Ellison wrote:
> On 20/08/13 16:50, Johannes Schlüter wrote:
>
> > <snip> Terry Ellison wrote:
> > > PHP (unlike some language alternatives) seems to be doing little to
> > > improve general performance, and the discussions related to
> > > performance on this DL are almost non-existent.
> > Looking at any benchmark from 5.2 to 5.3 to 5.4 and 5.5 shows notable
> > improvements (5.4 to 5.5 maybe not as much as the others) saying we do
> > little is a bit misleading.
> >
> > But well, it is simpler to do these syntax sugar things we're
> > bikeshedding about than doing actual core improvements. We have just
> > very few people fully understanding the engine and being able to improve
> > it. So such discussions gain no traction.
> I apologise if this sounded as unreasonably critical, as this wasn't
> my intent. As it happens, my particular interest is in PHP
> performance and I've got a good understanding of the Zend Engine and
> opcache, but trying to work out how I can contribute effectively to
> this is difficult for me given this lack of traction.
If you have to apologize I held back too much on syntax sugar bikeshed
discussion flaming :-D
> However, I don't think that this is appreciated in the wider PHP
> community (for example I can't recall it ever being discussed or
> emphasised on StackOverflow). I feel that it got lost in the reaction
> to APC not working reliably with the early 5.4 dot releases.
Well performance was discussed in the 5.3 time a bit, 5.4 never really
got traction as, frankly, it doesn't provide notable new features and so
people stay with distributions, which were just getting to 5.3 when 5.4
came out. (just looking at the news file to remember, 5.4 were traits,
great feature, but very specialized and then "syntax sugar" like short
array syntax, Class::{expr}(), callable, ... they are nice, but nothing
demanding a version upgrade, "nobody" would break 5.3 compatibility just
for using them)
AND, frankly, performance is no reason for most™ users to upgrade - PHP
for most™, is fast enough. And for many of those for who it is too slow
the performance issue actually isn't in PHP, but external IO (databases
etc.). If you look at your typical Drupal site where 80% or so is spent
in database (thanks to all the fancy modules you have) we can improve
PHP performance by unrealistic 50% and still just hardly see an overall
win.
Sure there are many "power users" who need more but those don't create
such a buzz, they do their business.
(and as you mentioned stackoverflow - such places are crowded by people
who try to get their copy&pasted "code" working it's already hard to
find the medium level questions there ...)
Anyways, this is all off topic in this thread and better belongs to a
pub while having a beer or such in ones hand ;-)
johannes
--
PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
