[Mono-list] asp.net or php

[Alan Knowles]

Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> 
>>Just to get everyone's opinion, how interesting would it be to make PHP
>> a NET-enabled language with Mono?
> 
> 
> Such efforts have been started as weekend projects, but never fully
> completed.
> 

yeap  - I can vouch for that :) - although it took alot longer than a 
weekend :)

I left off at the point of attempting a PHP->C# mapping, as compiling 
down to opcodes was a bit complex given the extreme complexity of 
auto-typecasting (eg. array(1,2,3) == true evals to true!, where as 
array(1,2,3) == 1 evals to false...) in PHP.

Like all compilers - they need alot of time... and unless you have a few 
good target milestones (eg. like self hosting in mono's case), 
motivation is also difficult.

One concern was that the zend engine uses a simple struct to represent 
all variables, which appears to be very effecient way to deal with types 
in a non-fixed type language like PHP. It is one of the potential 
advantages of parrot over .Net, as a better target for PHP. (eg. adding 
opcodes or native types to the opcode runtime may be more feasible..)

Sterling and Thies are looking at a parrot compiler for PHP(6?).. - I 
believe there was another effort in VB.NET to write a PHP compiler for 
.NET.

I wont go to much into the pro/cons of languages :) - thats a whole 
flame war in it's own right.. - google for language XXX vs YYYY and I'm 
sure you will find some good arguments on all sides...

> You have to separate two things though:
> 
> 	* The language
> 
> 	* The platform.
> 
> PHP is a language typically bound to a web-based platform.  Lets call
> them PHP-language and PHP-platform to distinguish them.

> ASP.NET provides the language-neutral platform for an object-oriented
> way of designing web applications.  

One of the snags many people see, is that the Zend engine is perfectly 
acceptable performance/language learning wise for 98% of its current 
uses as a Web platform (so there is little momentum in this area) - alot 
of the interest in Parrot/.Net ports was (apart from the challenge), 
moving the language into other arenas - desktop... etc...

Regards
Alan



> 
> Miguel
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