Johannes Schlüter

I recently wrote a few postings about great Sun stuff. The reason for that? - Well since joining Sun I get all the information about the things Sun does and there are tons of cool things, I enjoy OpenSolaris, especially DTrace and zfs (zfs snapshots!) - these are great pieces of technology. Ok, you can feel that OpenSolaris isn't finished yet, but it's a good step from a classic Unix to a quite usable system.

Now Sun is famous for another product family: Java. For me Java has always been a synonym for ugly and annoying applets and over-engineered "enterprise" applications which are close to being unusable. Being Sun I learned about a new technology for fighting the RIA wars against Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's Flex: JavaFX. After browsing a while over the different sites I found out that key part of JavaFX is a declarative scripting language for creating user-interfaces. That sounds quite cool - no annoying and over-verbose XML and no procedural coding for describing a GUI, but a syntax which looks quite sane for that. So I wanted to give it a shot. And that's where the trouble began ...

While going through some old backups I found some funny stuff I did back in the times when I was a bit bored (or maybe just frustrated?) A PHP extension written using mostly Assembler instead of C.

If you are interested in scary and useless stuff you can fetch the code and try it. There is some C code in it to create two required structures (which makes no sense doing in assembler imo - while this doesn't mean that thing makes any sense) but all functions and everything else is done using Assembler in the nasm syntax for 32bit x86 machines. If you really want to try t you need nasm and a PHP built environment. After running phpize and configure, just as for any other extension, you might need to edit the Makefile holding two rules for the .s file (remove the one using gas as assembler)

The extension exports a single function confirm_asmext_compiled() which prints some stuff using PHP's output mechanism and returns an integer, which is a bit tricky using Assembler since from the C perspective the return value is returned using some zval * structure passed by reference (making it a zval **) to the function so you need to dereference it and need to check/find out how the C compiler arranges the zval structure...

Yes for doing such a thing you have to be real bored (or maybe just extremly frustrated....) I'm happy this being a few years ago but I wanted to archive it somewhere