* Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> [Thu, 19 Nov 2009
12:49:36 -0500]:
We really don't want to increase the amount of
non-PHP code in core
unless absolutely necessary, IMO. PHP is an awful language, but it's
the only thing that all current MediaWiki developers know. Anything
else is much harder to maintain, because only some subset of people
with commit access can competently alter it. I'm sure most committers
know basic C syntax, but few would be confident enough to make
significant changes to a C program (and if they tried they'd probably
introduce giant memory leaks and such). Just a while ago, it took
days to fix a simple XSS in Timeline because it was written in Perl.
Besides, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. dvipng (which is
apparently used here) should be able to do whatever we want, as far as
I can tell. Failing that, ImageMagick or such would likely do the
trick.
Recently I've come to interesting implementation of PHP in Java:
http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/quercus/
They claim it runs MediaWiki. Probably can be used for mixed PHP / Java
environment and for the smooth transition to Java?
Dmitriy