> I am not a developer, but I think the approach of the phpng developers is
> not
> fair. The 64 bit topic and its RFC has been worked on and discussed for
> weeks or
> months and now theirs suddenly phpng and all the former work should be
> thrown away?
Dmitry communicated at least some of his concerns about this patch long ago,
back in January. Of course that's back when phpng didn't yet exist, and the
impact wasn't as big as it is now. This patch can undo partts of the gains
Dmitry and team managed to painstakingly squeeze out of the engine's data
structures.
You self-admitted not being a developer (a C developer I guess) - but I'm
sure you can imagine how painful it is to squeeze even 1% of performance
gain out of an already extremely optimized piece of code - one that's been
optimized for more than a decade - let alone 10-30%. This performance
currency shouldn't be traded lightly. Performance isn't above all other
things, but it is above changes which are purely theoretical and have no
meaningful end user value.
Zeev