[Foss-cafe] a little piece i wrote on the end of the world

[Daniel Cassidy]

Fred Smith wrote:

>On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 14:17, Daniel Cassidy wrote:
>  
>
>>Using PHP to write GUI software is quite frankly insane. 
>>    
>>
>
>I don't agree at all.  PHP is a great language to write small to
>mid-sized GTK applications in.  It has *tons* of great features like
>database integration, string manipulation routines, network transparent file handles, XML-RPC/SOAP functionality, image manipulation libraries, etc.  And that's not even counting the stuff you can do when you integrate pear. It's also much faster than you'd think an interpreted language could be.
>
How fast do I think an interpreted language can be?

The short answer is 'as fast as Perl'. And PHP is slower than Perl, at 
least last time I checked. So it is in fact slower than I'd think an 
interpreted language could be.

But, maybe I'm being too harsh. I'm only acquainted with PHP as an HTML 
preprocessor, which is of course what it was originally designed for, 
and it was rubbish for that purpose. It would be thoroughly ironic if it 
turned out to be better for GUI software than web pages. And I do agree 
that whatever languages people want to use should be available.

> On a modern machine (like my 3 year old thinkpad) it's difficult to tell that the application isn't running from native compiled code.
>
>The only downside I find is that it depends on having the php
>interpreter installed, which isn't something you can always depend on
>with a desktop machine.
>  
>
Hopefully there will be a PHP -> Parrot compiler one day.