[quote:c6ac26fa77][i:c6ac26fa77]Originally posted by moronhead[/i:c6ac26fa77]
I have a gut feeling that ozzi was rather trying to imply PHP when he said &...something a little faster ...&! :p [/quote:c6ac26fa77]
PHP isn't faster, especially for the way the control panel works. PHP would have to run in the same environment as Perl or anything else, in which case it's no faster (and likely slower and less stable). It is faster as a web server module if you compare Perl running as CGI, just as a module to run Perl in the httpd process would be faster than PHP as CGI. PHP might nbe hyped and sound all amazing and better/faster, but it's not and that would not be a good idea at all for a control panel. You'd have to have the web server do special tasks that only privileged users should be able to, which means some access to sudo or some such thing, or have the web server running as root (definitely a bad idea).
Since PHP or Perl (or C or C++, or Python, or...) would have to be running as a service daemon, it would not be any faster. Also, PHP has a history of many security issues and bugs and Perl has not. Let just put it this way, there's bugs and exploits before about every single PHP upgrade. Perl 5.005 has been stable for about 2 or 3 years now without any major security issue that required an upgrade. Years, compared to weeks or months that PHP *requires* updates and patches to resolve security issues.
It would never, ever, be a good idea to write any significant portion of a control panel that will be doing vital things on a system in PHP. I could go on about it, but PHP is not faster than Perl anyway. We aren't talking about scripts that run on a web server as a module or CGI and comparing Perl scripts running as CGI (or PHP running as CGI for that matter) or comparing mod_php with mod_perl and so on.
Again, people seem to be confusing Perl with CGI and a control panel with scripts ran on a web server. None of those are relevant to a control panel or how the programs/scripts run. Perl is slow in CGI due to CGI having overhead. PHP can run as CGI too, and also have the same overhead. Either can run as a server module and not spawn off processes that CGI causes, but none of that would have any relevance to how the control panel works (unless something major changed, which I don't think would be an improvement if that aspect changed).