Hey, I have a new topic I'd like to discuss. It's about mbstring and whether do we really need to support running without it.

The RFC is at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/267309/

Here's a copy:

MediaWiki currently relies heavily on Unicode support to provide support for 300+ languages yet does not require the mbstring PHP extension to function. Instead, we create PHP-only fallbacks if a native support is not available. This creates a few problems: * These fallbacks are extremely slow. The script in P2734 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/P2734 demonstrates that fallbacks are roughly order of magnitude slower on PHP 5.6. In extreme cases, it can be 100+ times slower, per comment in Fallback.php). * These fallbacks cover only a few functions. If there's no fallback, either ad-hoc solutions are used in places, or, like in SwiftFileBackend, we just say "mbstring is required". * This also means that extensions can't expect any consistent Unicode support. * Won't somebody please think of the children!

Now that we've dramatically increased PHP requirements, we've already cut off a lot of crappy environments so this change will likely not affect too many users.

OS support: * On Debian-based systems, a simple apt-get install php5 gives you mbstring by default. * On RPM-based, a separate package is required * On Windows, people tend to use *AMP all-in-one packages that have mbstring.

Current mbstring usage in core (excluding fallbacks themselves):

mediawiki/includes$ grep -orEh '\bmb_\w+' . | sort | uniq -c 7 mb_check_encoding 6 mb_convert_encoding 12 mb_strlen 4 mb_substr

Some time ago, I committed https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/267309/ to start a discussion, but it went largely unnoticed so I'd like to start a formal RFC.