Re: beginning plannings for PEAR for PHP6

Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
> Justin Patrin wrote:
>> On 10/14/06, Gregory Beaver <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> #2 libraries need to be opcode cache-friendly (require instead of
>>> require_once, or a class loader)
>>>
>>
>> Could you explain more about this (or point us to some resources on
>> it)? This is the first I've heard of require_once not being ok to use.
>> Why in the world would using _once break an opcode cache?
>>
>> Ok, looking myself I found:
>> http://www.phpinsider.com/smarty-forum/viewtopic.php?t=7674&sid=a4a5feb6971f5dd4201d34aa6327d4d3
>>
>> which links to a post by Rasmus explaining this somewhat:
>> http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=php-dev&m=113883455711935&w=2
>> and a post to the lighttpd forum:
>> http://forum.lighttpd.net/topic/864
>>
>> Rasmus' message says he's looking into ways to fix this and tihs was
>> back in Feb. Perhaps he's fixed it by now? (I'm not subscribed to
>> php-internals, so...)
>
> We don't have a decent fix.  And it isn't that it breaks an opcode
> cache, just that it isn't very efficient because we end up with a
> useless open() syscall.  In general you are way better off declaring
> your dependencies up front and avoiding include spaghetti.  No matter
> what we do, if a script makes 5 calls to require_once on the same file
> that is always going to be way slower than a better organized
> application that makes a single call to require.  We should be
> encouraging the latter, not the former. 
Hi Rasmus,

Since PEAR can't reliably load dependencies in libraries without some
kind of class loading, are you saying that you like the
autoload/class_exists('classname', true) solution I proposed, or that
something else would be better?

Thanks,
Greg