[ArbitraryLimits]

Not about heap allocators but I followed the "About" link to this text:

> At Intersec, technology matters…Because it’s the core of our business, we aim to provide our clients with the most innovative and disruptive technological solutions. We do not believe in the benefits of reusing and staking external software bricks when developing our products. Our software is built in C language under Linux, with PHP/JavaScript for the web interfaces and it is continuously improved ...

So now I'm wondering whether PHP is actually perceived as being hard-core?

Also, how would one stake a brick?

[xamuel]

C+PHP+Ajax(+SCGI or FastCGI) is my go-to when I want to create essentially a custom webserver but don't actually want to reinvent an entire http daemon from scratch. The PHP is used to simplify routine annoying tasks, while letting the custom server do the fun stuff.

[dexen]

PHP can be thought of as ``configuration + templating language for your C application'', with the C application being both the http server, and stock and your custom PHP plugins.

Yes, the whole stack can get hardcore, as long as you don't force PHP to do what other parts of the stack (SQL, JS) excel at, if you end up processing large datasets in short time :^)

[chris_wot]

I think the really hard stuff isn't done via PHP. Seems to me they use PHP as the front end because they want to focus on their really valuable technology - their C code.

[fruneau]

PHP is used as a small layer that enables talking to our C code from javascript. We have a custom (Protocol Buffer-like) protocol to manage our RPC, the PHP embeds a native module that implements that protocol and exposes a webservice to which our Javascript code can talk in order to provide some valuable user-experience on top of our C-written technologies.

Nowadays there is so little intelligence in the PHP that we only consider it as a pass-through layer.