rfc:php_native_interface

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PHP Native Interface

Design of the design of phpni, a native interface for PHP, designed to replace the Zend API.

See also remove_zend_api.

Why do we need a PHP Native Interface?

The rationale is explained separately in remove_zend_api.

//phpni//: The PHP Native Interface

This describes the design of phpni, the PHP Native Interface. This design is in early stages. The stages required until completion are described later.

Design Criteria

  • Remove any couping between the Zend Engine, extensions and SAPIs.
  • Support all major use cases of the Zend API
    • embedding within SAPIs
    • proving access to C libraries
    • providing the ability to rewrite performance sensitive code in C

Solution

Take the use case of wrapping a C library to expose its functionality in user space. The major idea is to “automatically” import C functions into a special namespace. The PHP library functions would then be comprised of PHP user space code which calls those C functions directly. That way it is possible to craft an API that is separate from the C implementation.

Lets take a simple example. Assume we have a C library XXX, with 3 functions, x, y and z. We'd like to expose this in user space as a class called MyXXX, with methods a and b. We create a file with the signatures of x, y and z:

extensions/xxx/sigs.h 

int x (int, int);
void y (char*, int);
void z (char*, int);

We then write our user space code:

extensions/xxx/MyXXX.php 

class MyXXX
{
   function __construct ($username)
   {
       $this->username = $username;
   }

   function a ($w1, $w2)
   {
      $foo = \internals\XXX\x ($w1, $w2);
      \internals\XXX\y ($this->username, $foo);
   }

   function b ($m1, $m2)
   {
      $foo = \internals\XXX\x ($m1, $m2);
      \internals\XXX\z ($this->username, $foo);
      return $foo;
   }
}

Interface

In order to interface between the PHP code and the C functions, a tool will be required to generate code. This tool will obviously be implementation specific. SWIG could be used to create this.

Zend engine

Since the libraries would no longer use the Zend API, the tight coupling would be broken. It would now be possible to change major parts of the Zend engine without affecting the operation of any other part of PHP.

Extensions/PECL

It would no longer be necessary to know the Zend API to write extensions. Instead, only the API of the C library is necessary, and the interface can be created in PHP user code.

Embed SAPI

The same interface used for libraries can be used to handle many of the use cases of the C API. However, it is likely that a means to call PHP user code from C/C++ code, will be required.

Other PHP implementations

Since PHP extensions are no longer written in the Zend API, other PHP implementations, such as Roadsend, Project Zero, Phalanger and Quercus should be reuse the libraries without difficulty. In addition, if the coupling is between the interpreter and its components is simple enough, it may be possible for other implementations to be slotted in directly. However, though this would be a nice side-effect, it should probably not be considered a priority.

Problems with current design

As the design progresses, problems will be identified, which must be solved. This section will keep track of them:

Problems to be dealt with

  • Strings:
    • How can we identify that an int field is the length of char* field?
    • Who will be responsible for freeing passed memory?
    • How do we decide whether to make a copy of the string?
    • How do we know if we can modify the string in place?
      • TODO: look at how JNI does it

Problems solved

  • Performance of say, pointer arithmetic, will suffer
    • With the basic design (v1.0), it should be simple to put a C layer above the C library, and wrap that instead.

Similar projects

Non-PHP

phpni differs from many of these in that it is designed not to add new features, but instead to replace an existing facility - the ability to call C libraries. As such, dynamic linking is not part of the spec.

For PHP

There is no reason we shouldn't reuse these, if they fit the bill.

Project Plan

This is a simple design. In reality, it would need to be prototyped to determine whether this makes sense for every use case, and that there would be little sacrificed to make it work. The work on it should probably progress in roughly the following order:

  • Prototype a single library
    • perhaps readline?
    • Manually write interface code between the header and the PHP code.
  • Discuss requirements with other PHP implementations
  • Write a utility to generate the interface code automatically
  • Using SWIG?
  • Test 5 or 6 libraries
  • Test more complicated functionality
  • Convert entire set of PHP extensions

Naturally, before the last step it will be necessary to get consensus from other internals developers that this is a good idea. It would be worthwhile to produce a document discussing the experience so far.

rfc/php_native_interface.1238959226.txt.gz · Last modified: 2017/09/22 13:28 (external edit)

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