* Daniel Friesen lists@nadir-seen-fire.com [Wed, 10 Nov 2010 05:54:51 -0800]:
Sorry, but the differences between PHP and JS are more than you think. Besides /x you're going to run into a bit of pain where /s is used. And you'll be rearanging code a bit to cache RegExp's created through string concatenation. And there's the potential to be tripped up by associative arrays if
the
parser uses them.
And as for WYSIWYG, parsing is quite different, at least if you're
sane
enough to not want to re-run an extremely expensive parser like the MW one for every few character changes. And then there are extensions...
The parser is heavy... even if you take into account how efficient JS engines have become and the potential for them to be even faster at executing the parser than php is you don't want a heavy directly
ported
parser doing the work handling message parsing client side.
PHP will never come to browsers. However, there is the way to bring Javascript to mod_php: http://pecl.php.net/package/spidermonkey It even has beta status, not alpha. Maybe even has a chance to be included to Parser? However, one should not expect to find it at "crippled" hosting. A good dedicated hosting / co-location is probably required to compile / setup it yourself (though a most of MediaWiki installations run from such hosting, not a crippled down ones).
The same language for server and client side would bring many advantages. Like you don't have to re-implement something complex twice in both languages, only the pars that are different for server / client. Dmitriy