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| Fig 1. Some Fiber |
Fibers are going to be available from PHP 8.1, they were voted in 50 to 14 ... I was one of the 14.
I've said before that I think merging Fibers was a mistake, but at this point, it doesn't matter what I think or thought: They are in fact part of the source code, and we have to work on this code together. So, I've tried to familiarize myself with evolving implementation details, be involved in the conversation, review pull requests, and generally make myself as useful as possible.
During the discussion phase of the RFC, the Swoole maintainers made clear that they did not approve of the implementation for various technical reasons.
There now appears to be some perceived friction with internals.
I want to deal with a couple of comments that I've heard repeated, or sentiments expressed:
Swoole is being treated with mistrust, possibly because it's Chinese.
This is a bizarre statement, and doesn't bear any resemblance to the truth.
While there may be some language barriers that make it hard for us to communicate in human words, especially on very technical matters: All of us speak the language of C. Even if nobody from Swoole spoke a word of English, we could, and would try to communicate in code.
There are also many members of internals whose first language is not English. There are pull requests that come with no words at all for that reason - albeit much simpler in general. Nevertheless, it illustrates that we do not need to understand each others tongues as much as you might think.
The idea that we would, should, or are exhibiting mistrust toward anyone because of their country of origin is abhorrent.
Swoole have years of experience in this field and we are discounting their opinions.
Swoole is a very clever extension, very clearly written by skilled and driven individuals, it's also a much more complete solution. I've also heard suggestion that because it is a complete solution it makes sense to adopt it.
Swoole maintainers have many years of experience in the field of developing an extension that provides a complete solution to the problems of co-op PHP.
However, when internals votes, and votes with the kind of turnout the Fibers RFC had, we do so with maybe a couple of hundred years of collective experience in the field of developing a programming language.
Developing a language is the relevant field here.
When we are writing extensions and we make them do bad things - and I know a little bit about extensions that do bad things - we make our peace with it, because they make our cool idea work.
We don't import that level of magic into PHP, it just isn't going to and should not happen.
Internals voted on the simple, bare bones implementation of Fibers quite purposely. When we done that, we left open many questions that the Fiber RFC did not intend to answer, purposely, around how to actually deploy Fibers in an application.
The adoption of a thing that looks like (all of, or any significant part of) Swoole, whether it comes in one part or one hundred parts is utterly out of the question because there is no mandate for that.
This does not mean that we don't find their feedback important, and useful: It means, quite clearly, there is some disagreement about the question of preparing the rest of PHP for Fibers. Swoole having found answers to those questions naturally think they have the correct answers, because they work.
I'll just re-iterate, and clarify: What happens in extensions, stays in extensions ...
What is actually happening ?
Usually, we like an implementation for an RFC to be ready at merge time.
In this case, because of the obvious need to develop the internal API and implementation details of Fiber, we decided to merge the implementation as it was, and iterate on that implementation with small pull requests - like most projects, we prefer small focused pull requests.
We want to move the implementation in a direction that is useful to everyone, within the confines of the mandate that the RFC gave us.
We are trying hard to do that, there's no ulterior motive to exclude anyone, and no mistrust, or anything of the sort.
We are simply trying to work together on this thing .... that is all.
That's all I have to say about that right now ...
Peace out, phomies :)
