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.