I'd really _like_ to be able to avoid having to
require external
executables either, if it can be managed, but that's harder since it
means having a pure PHP implementation of the scripting language.
(ouch!)
Maybe translating only a subset of JS or Lua to PHP. The engine itself
is written in PHP, anyway. Moving to C/Java modules would dramatically
reduce the popularity of engine. For example, right now I am having
difficulties compiling ffmpeg at old FreeBSD host. I imagine custom php
module can have similar difficulties.
Dmitriy