I’m thinking about developing a PHP C extension for Laravel. What’s your opinion?

[arshidkv12]

Example #56679

[Sophist-UK]

This post is lacking in veracity because this is NOT an idea for a future extension but rather essentially an advertisement for an extension already written - here was my analysis from the linked discussion topic #56679 ...

IMO there is nothing to stop an individual Laravel user from installing this and making their own code use it, however there are potentially several issues with it...

1. It is unclear what the real-life actual performance gains are - they would need to be pretty darned significant for me to even start to consider using this because of the potential risks of incompatibility that it might introduce. These need to be benchmarked and spelled out.

2. It is unclear whether installing the PHP extension creates any incompatibilities with existing code. However I suspect that by implementing methods using the same names as Laravel methods that this is highly likely. It also needs to be compatible with the entire Laravel ecosystem, not just with the Laravel core i.e. is it compatible with Octane?

3. It is unclear whether Laravel will treat a users Traitify\Singleton class exactly as it treats current singletons - but I think it pretty likely that it doesn't

4. Because it is not backwards compatible with existing code (i.e. it needs Traits) then I think it will be extremely unlikely that it will ever make it into Laravel itself.

I think that some explicit clarification around these points and changes to this package where needed and technically possible to improve the compatibility would most likely help.

You might want to consider changing it so that it uses different names from Laravel - and hopefully this will then avoid the need for using Traits. For users coding to use this explicitly it makes zero difference, but from a compatibility perspective it then enables you to have conditional code which checks whether the extension is installed and uses it if it is and doesn't use it if it isn't. If you can achieve this, and the performance gains are significant, then I can potentially see it being included in Laravel.