On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 2:02 AM, Dmitriy Sintsov <questpc(a)rambler.ru> wrote:
Is there any progress on this?
No.
Or, that's closed topic and such built-in
language won't be implemented?
There was no plausible candidate that would a) be reliably available
on shared hosting, b) be acceptably secure, and c) not require us to
write our own interpreter in PHP. There is probably no such language
that exists. I find it very unlikely that any progress will be made
unless at least one of those requirements is relaxed.
By the way, the lots of MediaWiki installations use
TeX, so OCaml is
already available as the language for extensions.
No, that's not acceptable. You can still use practically all
Wikipedia content without getting texvc working. If an embedded
scripting language were added, it's a certainty that the large
majority of templates on Wikipedia would be gibberish without it.
Personally I don't see what's wrong with saying that to fully use
Wikipedia content your host needs to allow exec() -- you can get
hosting for $3/month that does. But if the user can compile texvc, he
can use some sane language like Lua as well, so there's certainly no
reason OCaml should be on the table.
Also, Bryan Tong Minh had a great idea - choosing
between an external
(compiled) version of Lua (or another scripting language) and
"fallback" to slow built-in interpreter, when the first choice is
unavailable. Perhaps a limited subset of Lua.
It can't be a limited subset if Wikipedia templates are meant to work.
It needs to be an exact match. Someone would have to write a Lua
interpreter in pure PHP, which is unlikely to happen.