This is a repost because some mentally insane moderator of this site
deleted the previous one and blocked all comments for it, accusing me
of “casual racism”, without pointing out where this “casual
racism” is supposedly located or what “racism” even means to begin
with, which nobody has ever managed to define for me in spite of me
asking that question all my life.
I’ve long wondered about what exactly “Zend” and “Zend engine” is. It seems deeply associated with PHP, yet was not there from the beginning. Linking me to some page which talks about what it is will not explain it for me since I’ve read many such pages over the years and I still don’t get it.
I read the Wikipedia article on “Zend engine” yesterday and it mentions that it appears as “late” as in PHP 4. So before PHP 4, there was no “Zend engine”. How did PHP work then, if it’s so crucial to PHP?
I don’t understand why there is an “engine” which is involved at some deep level with PHP. I thought we just had simple text files beginning with < ?php and then PHP's executable interprets the text code in it, turns it into something that computers can read faster and then executes the actual instructions. I don't get where the "Zend engine" comes in.
I also noticed that it’s from Israel and was (originally?) developed by two smart Jews in an university. Oddly, Rasmus (the creator of PHP) is not mentioned and seems to have not been involved at all in this “Zend engine”. This confuses me further.
Why is “Zend engine” a separate thing from PHP? What exactly did those two guys do that make the PHP people integrate their “engine” into PHP? What precisely does it actually do? This seems impossible to get answered.
Could the Zend engine be ripped out of PHP and PHP would still function, only it would be slower or something? Is PHP dependent on this third-party project even though it survived for 3-4 generations (until PHP 4) without it? What benefit does it provide? What’s the… “deal”?
It would really be nice to finally “put this to rest” after I’ve been confused about it for almost 20 years.
PS: I don’t wonder about “Zend” as in the company, because obviously it provides PHP-related commercial services. “Zend framework” seems to be just another PHP framework, so I also don’t wonder about that.
