Freezing Layers (static vs dynamic)

Let me warn you right up front: this is a philosophical and rambling post.  I'm trying to pull together a series of observations into a coherent structure and it's quite possible that I failed at that.  In addition, because of its lack of quality, “PHP” throughout refers to the 5.x and earlier lines.  Version 7.0 basically addresses the error complaint.  Now without further ado, here is your ancient, rambling post...

I've written some Perl code using FCGI managed by mod_fcgid, in which I constructed my own request loop and application pre-loader.  (And complained about the way mod_fcgid is set up, since it doesn't pre-fork fastcgi children—whenever concurrency is exceeded, starting from zero after a fresh startup, someone has to wait for the world to load just like the bad old CGI days.)

I've written plenty of PHP as well, where you get to generate a response in response to routing once the server environment gets around to delivering the request to you.  The only things that may persist from request to request are allocated on the C level, not by the PHP script directly: most famously, opcode caches and persistent database connections.

The Common Denominator

On my back-burner at work, following a company-wide deprecation of Perl, is porting our Perl-based API services to PHP.

This may be painful, because by the time I wrote the API code, I was fluently using Perl-isms in Perl code.  It’s possible this won’t be a straightforward port because most of that is missing in PHP.

In comparison, back when I first started working here, I ported a small sub-site from Perl to PHP.  It was written in a style where I mostly needed small, mechanical changes like taking out my.  The only “big” change was creating an equivalent for HTML::Template, but that was pretty small itself.

Maybe you can write Java in any language… but then it’s 10 times easier to port to another language.