Happy-melon wrote:
I took it to mean that he wanted to split the math
parsing out as a
**MediaWiki** extension, implementing <math> as a parser tag hook in the
usual way. Which is definitely highly desirable.
--HM
Making it a MediaWiki extension is of course desirable (moving texvc out
of core is a pending issue, at least now <math> can be used by extensions).
but Damon wrote:
Another possibility be writing it in C to avoid all
interpreter
overhead, and using a foreign function interface. Unfortunately, I'm not
familiar with PHP's FFI. Google takes me to
http://wiki.php.net/rfc/php_native_interface
which seems to think that as of a year ago there weren't any good ones,
but this doesn't look too painful:
http://theserverpages.com/php/manual/en/zend.creating.php
That's about PHP extensions (which are written in C).
So, instead of going that path, he should make a C program which does
what texvc does. It can then be moved into a PHP extension if really
needed, but starting with Zend extensions would be an unneeded pain for
this project.