Hey, we're currently considering an RFC regarding of what to do with mbstring support in MediaWiki: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T129435
In a nutshell: mbstring is a PHP extension that adds support for Unicode string operations. MediaWiki requires it to function, however not every PHP install in existence has it. MediaWiki in those situations either creates slow PHP-only replacements or just crashes. In the RFC, 2 possibilities are discussed:
* MediaWiki requires mbstring and doesn't work without it. * MediaWiki uses a polyfill library to consistently override all mbstring functions if they're absent, at the cost of string operations being 10-100 times slower (basically, what it currently does but more consistently and code is maintained by a third party).
We would like more input on this issue from third-party MediaWiki operators: * Do you currently have mbstring installed? * If not, how hard would it be for you to install it? * Do you think it's worth it to force users to have mbstring in order to guarantee good performance?
Please comment on the Phabricator task.