PHP 5 Released; PHP Compiler, Too 524
TheTomcat writes "After years of anticipation, PHP 5 was released today. This release represents a milestone in the evolution of PHP. It sports the new Zend Engine II, a completely re-worked object model, and many many new features. Check it and the changelog out."
In other PHP news, remote_bob writes "There have been many attempts, like
BinaryPHP
and PASM,
but finally there is a complete
compiler
for PHP. The Roadsend compiler produces standalone, native executables, and supports the entire PHP language (but not all extensions). It uses
Bigloo Scheme
to do its job, a variant of Lisp, the language that
Paul Graham writes about.
Benchmarks say that performance is pretty good. Is this another sign that dynamic languages are the future?"
So it is out... (Score:3, Insightful)
Short answer... (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes.
PHP is moving in the right direction (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember, nobody's forcing you to upgrade that site running perfectly well under php4, and you probably shouldn't.
the past is the future (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm starting to think there are no new ideas any more, just re-hashes of old ideas. Unix, almost 35 years old, looks to be once again the wave of the future. LISP is still teaching us lessons. And the command line is still the most powerful sysadmin tool we have.
Re:Goodbye Perl? (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus, is there any greater comedian in the community than Larry Wall?
Re:the past is the future (Score:1, Insightful)
Now that at first doesn't seem to waylay your point, but it's important to remember that many small changes in the end give a huge result which is of the same scale as the paradigm shifts you were looking for. If you don't believe it, go back to one of the really old systems and see for yourself.
As for new ideas, well I think the distributed computing systems are coming up well now, I suppose the idea is quite old. But till not all to long ao implementation was far from easy or cheap. As such I think you could consider it as a newcomer then.
Quickshot
Re:Goodbye Perl? (Score:3, Insightful)
Any decent language has full PCRE support these days. Perls days as regular expression king are in the past. Sure it may have set the standard for how it's done, but now it's no longer a selling point. Plenty of other nicer languages exist.
C has full PCRE support. That doesn't mean its regexp support is royal.
One of Perl's advantages is just how tightly integrated into the language regexps are. I haven't seen PHP5 yet, I hope it's better than PHP4. I'm just saying that PCRE support does not a good regexp language make.
Re:Goodbye Perl? (Score:3, Insightful)
The biggest problem with PCRE in PHP is the escaping problem. PHP needs something so you don't end up with having to type \\\\ to match a backslash.
Why Perl is still the Regex king (Score:5, Insightful)
Second Perl has some nice features that PHP and Python lack. Of course PHP has some nice features that Perl and Python lack, and Python has some nice features that..... You get the point.
Even Javascript has some nice features if you are scripting other components (i.e. in a XUL application) but the next time I ask someone how to itterate through a hash table in Javascript, they had better not say "you don't..."
Re:PHP - ASP Showdown (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Goodbye Perl? (Score:5, Insightful)
PHP for shell scripts? That's just strange. ick.
PHP 5 still lacks namespaces, that alone is a good reason not to switch. That and CPAN (and no before you mention it, PEAR doesn't come anywhere close)
Since I always get the same replies everytime one of these posts comes up I'll answer them all now.
I use PHP everyday, its part of my job (sysadmin/web-developer). Have been using it for 4 years. At first I thought it was alright, but the more I've used it the more I loathe it. I find it inconsistant and I find at its core everything that goes against what a well designed language should be.
Perl code is not ugly unless you make it ugly. You can make C or PHP ugly as well.
Perl can be used in projects with multiple developers, I work with one other developer on a regular basis, sometimes two. At the beginning of the project we plan core modules and set APIs and coding style, much like I would expect anyone would do for any language.
IMHO and experience mod_perl is faster than PHP especially in larger apps.
Re:The future of programming languages: LabView (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:PHP - ASP Showdown (Score:3, Insightful)
That sounds like you're quoting a marketing guy with no idea what you're talking about.
Sure, ASP may contain DB connection pooling, and sure, PHP may not have it, but "Costs many thousands of dollars on Unix" is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
Show me this many thousands of dollars worth of "Database Connection Pooling On Unix".
Unix has nothing whatsoever to do with it. PHP runs in IIS quite nicely. And even if PHP was a Unix specific thing, there's nothing hard or expensive about connection pooling, and there are free libraries implementing it in just about any language that can access a database.
Re:Why Perl is still the Regex king (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:PHP is powerful, but weak in some aspects (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Don't you mean "Goodbye PHP"? (Score:1, Insightful)
Sure... just ignore the errors... it'll never happen anyway, right?
Senior Programmer
Davenport, FL USA
"What company do you work for?"
"A major one"
...
Re:Woohoo! Now only 3 years out of date! (Score:3, Insightful)
All the new features are sort of the stuff you would call a 'given' for object-oriented programming. Nice to have, but nothing to get really excited about.
Really the things that I found more interesting about PHP were all the system-oriented capabilities developed from version 4.3 onward, such as streams, sockets, direct I/O, etc... Of course, all these are givens in some languages too
The other cool things about PHP are the really dynamic things you can't do in Java, such as variable variables ($$varname), variable function calls ($function_name()), and the extended features for variable interpolation in strings [php.net]. Also, features like array_map, create_function, and the overload extension are quite cool.
But yes, it looks like Perl 6 is going to up the ante big-time. Interesting to see where PHP goes in the interim, though.
Perl2Exe, PAR... Perl rocks.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I see so many posts about how this would make them switch from perl to php.. but perl has had this for ages...
http://www.indigostar.com/perl2exe.htm
http://par.perl.org/
HEH!!!
Re:Why Perl is still the Regex king (Score:3, Insightful)
If you know all those other languages, you probably don't need much to learn one more. Come on! The first one's tricky, the second one's annoying, all the rest are easy.
Hell, I can't remember the last time it took me more than 15 minutes before I could code a new language (and I'm not talking 'hello, world' either).
Wait a minute, you count VB, Bash, and SQL as programming? Maybe that explains it all. Some of us consider those UI.
More proof . . . (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The future of programming languages: LabView (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe, just maybe, there's a reason for that.
While "graph" programming may be useful for data flow programming, it's absolutely useless for general purpose programming. For general purpose programming the devil's in the details and introducing a "graph" programming language just moves you further away from the details without actually giving you control of the details (see Joel Spolsky's article about "leaky abstractions" as to why this is a bad idea).