[WikiEN-l] MediaWiki is getting a new programming language

[Matthew Brown]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 6:00 AM, Charles
Matthews<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Not that the template issue shouldn't be addressed when the
> kludginess starts hitting home; but as they say "Le mieux est
> l'ennemi du bien" ([[:q:Voltaire]]). Fortunately your
> sentiments are compatible with mine.

To be fair, the current system has some advantages:

1) It's implemented purely in PHP, and thus does not require the
installer to be able to compile code or install it; furthermore, since
it works on any system that PHP works on, it adds no compatibility
issues.
2) It is adequately sandboxed and programs written in it cannot escape
into the system that runs MediaWiki.
3) It has pretty tight resource limits making it hard (though not
impossible) to DoS a MediaWiki host through the template language.

It's going to be tricky to keep all of those with another language;
it's quite likely that point 1 will be lost in any replacement, for
instance, unless we're willing to put in a lot of work polishing up a
language parser written in PHP (there are PHP Javascript engines, for
instance, but all would require significant work to be usable).

-Matt