dl()

[mcalpine]

can someone explain the dl() function to me, please?
i know it dynamically loads extensions..... what does that mean?
is it like loading an include file into memory? to make for faster processing...?

thanks
-m

[intenz]

It's to load modules without configuring Apache with them.

Like the GD library, you can load the GD library without configuring it with Apache by doing...

dl( '/path/to/gd.so' );

Have fun.

[jayant]

extensions are basically native code written in c/c++
while all php code goes thru an interpreter.
native code is faster than interpreted code.

though it won't make sense to make a module for everything and stop using PHP, but for very processor intentive applications, or in case you wish to extend PHP, add a few more features etc. then extensions come into play.

[mcalpine]

so then , if i wrote a c/c++ app, and it returned some data....
how would i read the data that it returns....?

-m

[jayant]

use exec() function for that