[Xapian-devel] PHP Latest

[Olly Betts]

On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 03:48:06PM +0200, Daniel M?nard wrote:
> It seems, that while these variables are created by PHP, nothing 
> prevents one to use their name as the name of a function parameter. It 
> can't be considered as "good practice", it is not documented as 
> explicitely allowed, and of course it won't be possible from inside the 
> function to use the global predefined php var, but it seems to work (I 
> tested with php versions 4.3.10, 5.0.4 and 5.1.2 under windows and debian).
> Even using "$this" as a parameter name doesn't seem to clash anything !

Provided we don't use $this in the generated code...

So the only thing we need to perhaps check for is a prototype like:

class A {
    int b(int c, float c);
};

Which is valid as a declaration (although not for the actual definition)
and SWIG was changed to accept it because compilers do (due to an
example of this in xapian.i at one point!)

I think the change made SWIG rename the parameters in this case, but I
should check that this corner case works I guess.

> In my opinion, the only methods which still use call_user_func_array 
> (auto_open, quartz_open, muscat36_open_da, muscat36_open_db, mset.fetch, 
> enquire.getmset, delete_document, parse_query) are not aimed to be 
> called repeatedly, and the php overhead will probably be negligeactable 
> compared to the time taken by the function.

I should fix the patch to handle %rename-d methods/functions though,
since it should become a part of SWIG and in other wrapped libraries it
might matter more.

> Perhaps there is still some room for improvment in the constructors. 
> Many are still using call_user_func_array and I'm not sure that I 
> understand why.

I think it's because most classes have a default constructor and a copy
constructor so my patch sees:

Database::Database();
Database::Database(const Database & o);
Database::Database(const string & path);

So if we're happy for "new Database($foo)" to mean "new Database()" when
$foo is Null, it could be fixed, but I'm not totally sure that's a good
idea.

Alternatively, we can probably just ignore the default constructor in
cases where it only creates a useless dummy object - I think in PHP it
would be more natural to say "$db = Null;" rather than "$db = new
Database();" (hmm, actually this is a bad example, since it's not a
useless dummy object as you can then call "$db->add_database(...)" but
for many of the classes it's true).

> If I understood correctly, we wish to compare calling the flat functions 
> in the following versions :
> - 0.9.4 release version
> - 0.9.5 release version
> - 0.9.5 release version + xapian_wrap7.cc
> (0.9.4+patch won't compile because of the new method introduced)

Yes (you could try 0.9.4+patch and just nuke the wrapping bits for the
new method by hand actually, but that's probably not vital for working
out where the extra time went).

Cheers,
    Olly