Sara Golemon

Unlike PHP, C generally resolves function calls at compile time. When you introduce dynamically loadable shared objects, the ability to know their exact address ahead of time goes out the window and you have to fall back on link-time resolution (or in some cases, call-time lazy resolution, but we'll pretend that doesn't exist for now). It handles variables in much the same way; Resolve at compile-time if possible, link-time if not. As you can guess link-time resolution is slower, but necessary.

One of the things that makes this unnecessarily slower is libraries which export a lot of symbols which aren't needed outside of the file they were defined in. More symbols means a bigger lookup table, means more time spent finding that needle in a haystack. In order to balance the need for link-time (or runtime) lookup, C supports the static keyword. This tells the compiler to not bother putting this item into the symbol table, thus keeping it's size down. Since the number of symbols that actually need to be exported tends to be well less than half of the total, this can make for a substantial difference.

PHP Extension authors are lazy

If you look at the PHP source tree, or even the "recommended" skeleton found in ext_skel, you'll notice that few (if any) symbols are flagged as static even though they're only referenced in the file they're defined in. For example:

It's conference season again, here's my schedule:

Code Works - San Francisco - Sep 23

I'm only doing the first city of the Code Works tour which happens to be in the region of the US I live in, so that's convenient. Here I'll be presenting an updated version of PHP 5.3: Hot or Not which went down pretty well in Chicago earlier this year at php|tek '09. This hour-long overview of the much anticipated next release of PHP will run through the laundry list of new features, language constructs, and APIs with examples of use, mis-use, and hopefully a two-way discussion of what features are most important to developers.

Later that same day, I'll blow the dust off the Navigating Streams presentation I gave in Mörfelden three years ago at IPC2K6. There's a lot more to do here as things have changed somewhat in the past three years, and the old slide deck is kinda boring. Expect a fresh rewrite of this run-through on PHP's filesystem layer and all the little goodies that have been hiding underneath it all this time which you might not have known existed.

PHPNW09 - Manchester, UK - Oct 11

For reasons unrelated to PHP, I kind of need to be... not in California for awhile. The 6,000 miles between here and England sounds like a good start, so when I mentioned this in IRC a couple nights ago, Lorna (one of the phpnw organizers) very quickly batted eyes and twisted my arm into volunteering for a speaking slot. Given the short term, I offered to just reuse one of the presentations I'll be giving at Code Works (since the audience isn't likely to overlap much). Long story short, my planned visit through the Peak District, then onto Yorkshire will be bisected by a diversion through Manchester where I'll deliver PHP 5.3: Hot or Not a second time.

ZendCon - San Jose, CA - Oct 21

Last, but not least, I'll be returning home to Silicon Valley for the fifth installment of Zend Con. Here, Eli's asked me to give the über-compressed one-hour version of my presentation on PHP Extension Writing. Frankly, I don't like trying to take what is about 8 hours of content and shove it into the spandex biker shorts of a one hour session. As usual, I'll do my best, and having done this topic at least once/year for the past four years my best isn't half bad, but be sure to buckle in when you arrive. Once I get started talking on this, I won't stop until the next speaker kicks me out, or someone raises a hand (and please, do ask questions as I go, everyone wins when you raise your hand).

About a day and a half ago, Reddit user stderr posted a link to the PHP documentation showing that GOTO will be a part of the language as of version 5.3. Somewhere in the reddit comments for this post, a link was pasted to an entry on this blog where I announced the feature being added years earlier. This naturally brought out the usual flame wars that circle around something like GOTO and drove some new traffic to my blog. No big deal, my server is pretty low-traffic, it can handle a few extra hits.

Within a few hours, burghler had browsed through other entries on my blog, finding what was at the time, the most recent entry about my friend's experience burying her mother. Just like the first reddit post, which had made the front page, this one also had a somewhat incendiary title.

Okay, more than a little incendiary, but I'll get to that in a moment...

I grew up in California, and my state is pretty well true to it's reputation of being....less conservative than average. Granted, I've been harassed, shunned, even outright beaten over being queer, but I always thought that when it comes to certain things, especially family, there's a line that just isn't crossed. This is why the events of the past weekend so thoroughly amazed me.

Several months ago, when she told me that her mother had Cancer, I promised my kinda-ex-nevermind-it's-complicated-girlfriend that when the time came, I'd jump on a plane and fly out to the Midwest to help her bury her mom. So it was, that when she called me from Toronto (she was in the middle of a business trip), I booked a one-way flight (we weren't sure how long things would take), and flew off to Cleveland to meet her and offer my sympathies.

Death is hard, no matter how prepared for the end you are, but for my friend it was doubly difficult. For the past four years, she'd only rarely been able to see her mom, due to both distance and conflict between her and other people in her mother's family. We'd hoped that in the darkness of losing a loved one, those hard feelings and prejudices could be set aside, that family could come together for just one day to share grief and say good-bye. We were unbelievably wrong...

So I went on holiday to the UK about 2.5 weeks ago. Just before I took off, the retina in my right eye started bleeding. It's done this before, it's all part and parcel to being diabetic for 17 years. So I kept on schedule, enjoyed my vacation, and just as expected my eye began clearing over time. Yay!

So while my right eye is busy healing, my left eye has decided it wants to get in on the fun too (this is a new development for my left eye). Right now I'm effectively blind. I can make out large, rough shapes, I'm not going to stumble in front of a bus and I can even manage to configure the accessibility options built into MacOS. More yay! In the mean time, however, I can't see flying off to Canada for PHP Quebec (pun intended).

I'm sure things will clear up in a week or two, so please take lots of pictures and video, and I'm sorry I'll miss it!

Just a quick hit, as we're headed out to Ely for more touristing, but I wanted to provide an update on the weekend's activities... Except I probably shouldn't Suffice to say, we were in Birmingham and Dudley and had a wonderful time.

Saturday's culinary experiment: Pot Noodles

Sunday's culinary experiment: Sausage and mash (w/ Beer)

Forget the gap, mind the bloody ceiling!

Friday was a new treat, leading me and my guide (who's name is Sarah, yes that has led to much hilarity already) onto the express train to London for a day of wandering around the mammoth capitol city. We arrived in the somewhat run-down looking King's Cross station, passed by platform 9¾ and walked across into the much more updated looking St. Pancras station.

My sister asked me to find something in particular during my trip, so I asked for our first stop to be Leicester square. We wandered down a warren of staircases and passageways which looked like some post-apocalyptic ruin of crumbling concrete and rusted metal (which I'm assured is merely routine maintenance - mmm hrmmm) and boarded the first of what would be several tube carriages over the course of the day. I wonder if maybe I am just a typical American used to excess, because these train cars seem very small (vertically) compared to BART or other rail systems and I developed a minor crick in my neck from ducking the low ceilings.

I never did find the subject of my hunt in Leicester square, so after a few photographs we just continued on to Trafalgar, and across the Themes from there. We wandered through more districts from here... Canary Wharf (which kept making me think of the Doctor Who season two finale), Liverpool street (replete with floating sky scrapers), and a thoroughly entertaining show by a street performer involving near nakedness, a chainsaw, a not-six-year-old, and a homoerotic display of mounting a large man named Ben. Just... look at the pictures, there's really no way to describe that...

Today's culinary experiment: Full English Breakfast