Hi Ben,

The symposium was good.  The DLR looks like it will make a lot of the  
apparently hard bits quite simple to implement.

I got to talk to Tomas and Tomas face to face, and we talked about how  
to move forward.
I also got quoted in eweek (http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Net-Ripe-for-PHP-Picking/ 
), which was unexpected(!)

Phalanger is largely complete, but doesn't do very much to take  
advantage of some of the DLR features (particularly with things like  
eval()).

The mostly-done status of Phalanger means that there aren't many  
features left to add, so getting to 100% is theoretically faster than  
doing a from-scratch implementation.

However, the mostly-done status makes it harder and probably a bit  
less appealing to someone that wants to try their hand at developing a  
language implementation.  Which is more fun?

- improving the performance of a fast system by 1%
- improving performance of a hacked together system by 1000%?

I think it's important that whichever route we take is sustainable by  
the community so that it doesn't die out when a couple of contributors  
get too busy.  I think that making the initial work easier and more  
understandable will encourage the community to get more involved early  
on will create more key people too.

So what we thought was that we could build a DLR implementation by  
taking pieces like the scanner/parser and the bootstrapping code from  
Phalanger (which are all really just boiler plate), and then build a  
new set of guts to target the DLR from there.

I know that I'm not going to have a lot of spare time to work on this  
in much more than an advisory capacity, so it is especially important  
that we pick an approach that is doable and interesting.

What do you think?

--Wez.



On Feb 4, 2008, at 9:44 PM, Ben Ramsey wrote:

> On 1/20/08 11:21 PM, Wez Furlong wrote:
>> I find myself speaking at the Lang.Net symposium this year.
>> (http://www.langnetsymposium.com/agenda.asp)
>> The main reason that I'm attending is to gain more insight on  
>> getting PHP running on the DLR, and since we haven't come up with a  
>> plan for that yet, I've been doing some reading.
>
> How was the Lang.NET symposium. Any observations or anecdotes you'd  
> like to share?
>
>> I'll be sending an email with some early ideas in the next day or  
>> two.
>> If any of you have had any thoughts on this matter, I'd love to  
>> hear them.
>
> What are some of your early ideas. I'm eager to dig in and start  
> playing around with some things. :-)
>
> -Ben