Writing a PHP extension in C - part 2

PHP, PECL and PEAR provides more functionality than you can shake a stick at. Sometimes though you need to add functionality that is not yet provided by the core language or any extension. For example using IO or a C library that is not yet supported, or carrying out some processor intensive computation. In these cases you need to resort to writing your own C extension.

This tutorial comprehensively covers writing PHP extensions in C. It starts with setting up a build environment. It then introduces the basics of C extension development and work through an full example. The example will explain the various PHP data types and how PHP function arguments are handled in C. The tutorial will then move on to more sophisticated areas of extension development such as writing a stream wrapper, implementing PHP classes and using external C libraries. The tutorial will also look at using C++ rather than C as the extension language. It will cover the requirement of thread safety in extensions and explain the macros provided by PHP to support this. Finally it will talk about documentation and the facilities provided by the PHP site for PECL writers such as PECL database and SVN server.