PH7 – An Embedded Implementation of PHP (C Library)

by symisc_devel • 12 years ago

69 65 12 years ago

Touche5• 12 years ago

gcc -W -Wall -O6 -o ph7_test ph7_intro.c ph7.c

Nice! I wish creating Lua executables were this easy. With Lua you have to create a wrapper C file, use squishy to combine multiple lua files into one, and finally a script to turn the lua script into a C byte array. I have a boilerplate project that I use so that I just have to run `make`, that avoids the need to ever touch C for the most part. But it would be nicer if luac and luajit did this automatically.

unwind2• 12 years ago

On the other hand, the single-source engine is so large, GitHub won't display it on the web. :/

symisc_devel2• 12 years ago

SQLite style: The amalgamation is a single C code file, that contains all C code for the core. With one big unit, the compiler can perform several smart optimizations that cannot be done if the source code was split between different C files.

eksith• 12 years ago

I was curious why they did that. Just looked at the source and came across this :

  This file is an amalgamation of many separate C source files from PH7 version 2.1.
  By combining all the individual C code files into this single large file, the entire code
  can be compiled as a single translation unit.This allows many compilers to do optimization's
  that would not be possible if the files were compiled separately.Performance improvements
  are commonly seen when PH7 is compiled as a single translation unit.

The target does say for embedded so I guess that's from experience running this on very small resources.

aktau• 12 years ago

You mean so you can distribute a standalone binary that is actually just a bunch of lua? Do you do this so that the users have a harder time modifying the code (just curious)? I'm supposing that this is the case otherwise it would work pretty well with by using the lua or luajit interpreter and some wrapper bash/cmd.exe script to run your lua file(s).

Touche5• 12 years ago

You mean so you can distribute a standalone binary that is actually just a bunch of lua?

No, I'm saying that you can't. You create a wrapper main.c file that loads and executes the lua. I use a script that tranlates the lua into a C byte array so that I can avoid loading the external lua scripts.

Do you do this so that the users have a harder time modifying the code (just curious)? I'm supposing that this is the case otherwise it would work pretty well with by using the lua or luajit interpreter and some wrapper bash/cmd.exe script to run your lua file(s).

No, I do it to avoid having to worry about where the .lua scripts are located. Having a single binary is nicety, not required of course.

justincormack2• 12 years ago

LuaJIT can output bytecode as .o files that you can just link. It is not very well documented but its pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

Touche5• 12 years ago

.o files are not executable. You still have to link it to something that executes, and that something isn't Lua.

kodablah• 12 years ago

That is one big C file. Curious if you've ran against any of the Zend tests in the original implementation [1][2]. I do not see anything on http://ph7.symisc.net/.

1 - https://github.com/php/php-src/tree/master/tests 2 - https://github.com/php/php-src/tree/master/Zend/tests

FigBug• 12 years ago

I've been looking for something like this. Originally I had planned to do it with Python, but Python only seems to allow one interpreter at a time.

Does anybody know if it's easy to make new functions available to PHP that would call into the C main program?

It says "Built with more 470 function" how does that compare with standard PHP? If I take some PHP I've previously written or a library, is it going to run with minor modifications? Or is this a subset of PHP?

symisc_devel2• 12 years ago

Yes, most of the built-in functions (over 470) are foreign C/C++ functions installed exactly using the same interface: ph7_create_function();

stevekemp• 12 years ago

Yeah that was pretty nice to see.

My first thought on seeing this project was wondering how hard it would be to hook up to nginx, or similar. I don't really "do" PHP, so I'd probably not attempt it myself, but I get the feeling from having written nginx modules in the past that this doesn't look too hard - the PH7 API seems decent enough.

zalthor• 12 years ago

Curious, what do people who work with embedded systems usually use to get a web interface for their device? Routers, for as long as I can remember have had a web UI though I'm not really sure what sort of a back end runs it.

nifoc• 12 years ago

The UI (and maybe other parts?) of AVM routers ("FritzBox") is written in Lua.

z92• 12 years ago

Almost everyone use Lua.

captainmuon2• 12 years ago

My router from D-Link uses php (at least it has php in the URLs). I've seen some that use custom C programs with a webserver (cgi-bin) too.

up-n-atom• 12 years ago

A few that I've come around and evaluated are

https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/Libfast + http://www.clearsilver.net/

http://appwebserver.org/products/appweb/server-side-javascri...

http://duda.io/

http://luci.subsignal.org/

edsiper22• 12 years ago

i would be interested into your evaluation of Duda I/O, let me know your comments.

weland• 12 years ago

Lua is pretty widely used. C is also favoured but it's pretty easy to misuse so there are teams that shy away from it. I've seen Perl, Python and PHP, too, as well as some obscure languages. I distinctly remember seeing Tcl, but I don't remember the context so I might be bullshitting here.

It greatly depends on flash and RAM though. Past a certain point, Python or PHP are just too large.

jacob019• 12 years ago

Normally I wouldn't touch PHP due to the long history of security issues. Would this do anything to improve it? Love the idea of an embeddable interpreter.

davidw• 12 years ago

If you want an embeddable interpreter, Tcl and Lua are other possibilities.

sjf• 12 years ago

If insecurities are part of PHP, no, not unless they deviate from the standard implementation. And there are most likely a bunch of undiscovered stack overflow type insecurities in this new interpreter as well.

andrewmwatson• 12 years ago

you're right, RoR is WAY more secure...

BlackDeath3• 12 years ago

What made you jump to RoR?

q3k• 12 years ago

It might be less secure due to the fact that this is a new, untested and unproved implementation of a pretty quirky language.

munificent• 12 years ago

This seems like madness to me. It's "PHP", so it inherits everything that's bad about that language. But it's also incompatible with PHP, so you don't even get the power of being able to reuse the world's existing PHP code and expertise.

    * PH7 is case-sensitive unlike the standard PHP engine
    * Unlike the zend engine which passes arrays by copy, PH7 pass arrays by reference exactly like PHP5 does with objects (class instances).

I'm not saying the extensions and changes they've made aren't for the better, but they mean this language is effectively not PHP. And, if you're going to use a language that's not PHP, why not use one that's significantly cleaner and simpler?

Kiro4• 12 years ago

It's still great for embedded devices when your main language is PHP.

camus22• 12 years ago

when your main language is PHP.

There is your problem.If you cant learn anything else pretty sure you havent the skills to program any "embedded device".

captainmuon2• 12 years ago

This is pretty cool. First I was wondering what for, but its great for their use case (embedded devices). Why not use a language for the web interface the developer is familiar with.

Unfortunately, they're a bit late. Nowadays it would probably be cooler to use JS, if language popularity is the focus. Or maybe python.

(Aside: I learned web development in the good old LAMP times. My silly gut feeling is still that PHP is pretty fast and flexible compared to Python which seems slow (on the server), and JS which is way too slow and fragile. I know it's completely backwards nowadays, but funny how what you've learned sticks. When I hear "JS on a Arduino" I always think "yeah sure....", but it's actually a clever idea, just like this.)

Kiro4• 12 years ago

Is it Python really slower than PHP? If you could notice the slowness it seems like the difference would be pretty large.

RussianCow• 12 years ago

In my experience the difference in performance of the languages is negligible (assuming you have a solid PHP config). I run sites written in each, and I can't say one has caused me more performance problems than the other; it just depends on what you're doing with them.

camus22• 12 years ago

compared to Python which seems slow

This sentence doesnt mean anything. What Python task? What library ? what framework ? on what server? with which version ? ect... I can say PHP is slow too, just look at any PHP framework, lowest scores according to techempower benchmarks :

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=ec...

TheZenPsycho3• 12 years ago

"I know it's completely backwards nowadays, but funny how what you've learned sticks."

webjprgm• 12 years ago

I usually see arguments like this about language performance, but do people also argue about the difference from having a server process launch, configure itself, and stay open handling requests, like Ruby or Node.js, versus re-running initialization on each request like PHP?

A lot of that initialization code is hooking together objects, reading misc config flags, and setting up request routing. But what about ORM? Ruby's ActiveRecord has to query the database for a schema, right? In PHP that query would be done every request rather than just once when the server restarts.

Could this architecture issue have a larger performance impact than the minor differences in Python / PHP / Javascript / Ruby performance?

(There were also plenty of discussions about event-based programming versus blocking + multi-threading back when Node was becoming popular. That is another example of architecture being more important than execution speed.)

frik2• 12 years ago

The developer have also two other interesting projects on their website:

* jx9 - programming language based on JSON (like Lua with a JS syntax): http://jx9.symisc.net/

* unQLite - NoSQL database engine (like SQLite but NoSQL): http://unqlite.org/

edsiper22• 12 years ago

Unqlite is very good, we use it as our main in-memory key/value store in Duda I/O [http://duda.io].

ausjke• 12 years ago

For embedded device normally LUA is used, how does PH7 compare to LUA? as PHP/LUA is normally used to provide web interface, how does PH7 do CGI?

angersock• 12 years ago

Erm...how would people feel about having this as an available module for Node.js?

No reason. ;)

jbeja• 12 years ago

...

elwell• 12 years ago

Pretty cool, but why's it all in one .c file?

rlidwka• 12 years ago

62022 lines of code in a single file... is that a joke? :)

PH7 – An Embedded Implementation of PHP (C Library)

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