Everything

php

Windows snapshot builds switching to debug

php.internals

Christoph Becker

6 years ago

Hi all,

the PHP for Windows team is considering to ship all PHP snapshot
builds[1] as debug builds in the future (earliest at the end of March);
currently these are release builds.  The reason for this change is that
debug builds obviously have better debugging support (including but not
limited to WER[2]), and also execute assertions and enable the basic
leak checking of Zend Memory Manager.

Of course, the debug builds would be not as performant, and would be
larger in size, but that does not appear to be an issue for snapshot builds.

Thoughts?

[1] <https://windows.php.net/snapshots/>
[2]
<https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wer/windows-error-reporting>

--
Christoph M. Becker

Anatoliy Belsky

6 years ago

Hi Christoph,

I'd see not much value in switching to debug builds for the snapshots.
Currently the snapshots are public and are built with PGO. This makes
it easy for users to test any provided revision. Debug builds are
better suitable for the runtime development, but they require a debug
runtime, can't use PGO and are in most case unusable for users.

IMO, if debug builds of snapshots are needed for something, they might
be added, but release buids of snapshots should not be removed. It is
more important to ensure release builds, for debug they're also
suitable in 98% of cases as it always contains debug symbols. There are
many other points that would speak against switching to debug builds
only. For the developer needs, debug builds can always be done on
demand.

Regards

Anatol

On Thu, 2020-03-05 at 16:41 +0100, Christoph M. Becker wrote:

Christoph Becker

6 years ago

On 10.03.2020 at 13:59, Anatol Belski wrote:

> I'd see not much value in switching to debug builds for the snapshots.
> Currently the snapshots are public and are built with PGO. This makes
> it easy for users to test any provided revision. Debug builds are
> better suitable for the runtime development, but they require a debug
> runtime, can't use PGO and are in most case unusable for users.
>
> IMO, if debug builds of snapshots are needed for something, they might
> be added, but release buids of snapshots should not be removed. It is
> more important to ensure release builds, for debug they're also
> suitable in 98% of cases as it always contains debug symbols. There are
> many other points that would speak against switching to debug builds
> only. For the developer needs, debug builds can always be done on
> demand.

Thanks Anatol!  These are very valid points indeed.  I think we shall
re-consider.

It would be helpful to know who actually uses the snapshot builds, and
for which purpose.  So any feedback on that would be welcome as well.

Thanks,
Christoph