Re: PHP on .NET DLR

On Wed, Aug 08, 2007 at 10:03:58PM -0700, Andi Gutmans wrote:
> I believe they hired the Phalanger guys:
> http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=Phalanger
> 
> Andi 
> 

 So would zend or MS undertake the effort to port Phalanger to the DLR? Again, the work is almost completely finished, all that's needed is to port it to DLR. I personally think that the lack of silverlight support can be severely damaging to PHP, and PHP-Siliverlight actually only has benefits. PHP/Ruby/Python are never going to be full fledged members of the MS clan, and for an enterprise, it would always be better to use pure-php-interpreter  for their backend php programs.

 But with php on silverlight, we get the option to write silverlight client in PHP and then use the pure PHP backend on linux and windows. So at least for clients who are using the MS windows based browsers, all Linux PHP programmers will be able to deliver rich graphics if they want to. We will finally have linux/apache/php delivering full multi-media streams to windows clients, all in PHP. I would surely think that Zend only has to benefit in such a scenario.

 Yes, there might be some small short term monetary losses for zend since some people might use .NET to deploy PHP and may not use Zend's services, but again my personal experience is that, if someone has a real PHP application, using anything other than the orthodox PHP interpreter on Windows/Linux is a folly. Especially considering all the dependencies and the complexities.

 Ruby (now with silverlight support) is the most serious competitor to PHP at present. This is not merely my personal opinion, but rather just look at all the buzz generated by ironRuby. And if php won't catch up, it will definitely lose. At least, I personally would switch to ruby, even though I don't like languages that do not have curly braces everywhere.