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Linus Torvalds to Rewrite the Linux Kernel in PHP (web.archive.org)

submitted 6 months ago by morgunkorn@discuss.tchncs.de to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

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Finally i'm gonna be able to contribute!

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[-] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

Right -- I'm not saying you could build a compiler then just go to town. You would still have to build all the tools, using PHP, to interact with hardware, the way other languages do. A horrible idea, lol, but interesting, sort of. Since at its core as long as you can execute logic and read/write to memory, you could do it, I think

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 months ago

But that is what I mean with it needing an extension of the language.

So, I'm not saying you could just build a library that calls existing PHP functions to make it all work. Rather I'm saying there's certain machine code instructions, which just cannot be expressed in PHP. And we need those machine code instructions for actually managing memory. So, I am talking about reading/writing to memory not being possible, unless we resort to horrible hacks.

Since we are building our own compiler anyways, we could add our own function-stubs and tell our compiler to translate them to those missing machine code instructions. But then that is a superset of PHP. It wouldn't be possible in PHP itself.

Again, I'm not entirely sure about the above, but my web search skills couldn't uncover any way to actually just read from a memory address in PHP.