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phpinternalsbook / PHP-Internals-Book

PHP Internals Book
http://www.phpinternalsbook.com/
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Add chapter on embedding PHP #136

Open cubiclesoft opened 2 years ago

cubiclesoft commented 2 years ago

There is almost no documentation on the Internet on how to compile and use the PHP embed SAPI. The only "official" source is a very old book by Sara Golemon entitled "Extending and Embedding PHP." There's a macro called PHP_EMBED_START_BLOCK that appears to kick off the linkage between C/C++ code and the PHP embed SAPI. This is the first complete code sample that I found by searching for that macro:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73345686/store-output-of-php-execute-script

Girgias commented 2 years ago

I know @dunglas had started to write a bit because he hit the same issue while working on FrankenPHP

SammyK commented 2 years ago

The embed SAPI readme has basic info on how to compile and run the SAPI.

The embed SAPI isn't very useful on its own. It only allows setting up a full PHP startup + request cycle without the ability to take control of the individual request cycle within the startup cycle. It really serves as a bare-bones SAPI that is a good starting point for a fork.

Example: the unit tests for the Datadog PHP tracer are run with Tea SAPI which is a fork of embed.

Adding a chapter to the internals book on compiling/forking embed is a good idea. 👍

(Tangentially related; libphp is only created when PHP is compiled with --enable-embed which means if you fork embed, you'll need to enable embed to gain access to the shared lib. IMO we should add a way to create the shared lib without explicitly enabling embed so that we don't hit the too-many-SAPIs limit at compile time when you have a custom SAPI that you'd like to run alongside several other in-tree ones. But I only dream. 😄)