I find it fascinating. What tools did you use? Did you use UML for planning? Have you written a PHP to C converter? Are you using some meta language or template converter?
In the internal docs is explained why the extension is written as it is. https://internals.phalcon.io/en/latest/
In addition, we created the Phalcon Kernel (https://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon/tree/1.1.0/ext/kernel) which is a super API allowing us to write C code following a similar philosophy/workflow as PHP, this helps developers to understand better how the extension currently works, a developer can contribute code to phalcon by just thinking in PHP.
Some critical parts in terms of performance as some parts of the database access, the parsers, volt, phql, are written without using Phalcon Kernel.
I see, real helpful, thank you :)
So you're saying that you're doing the conversion to the phalcon api by hand? You don't have tools that translate php into phalcon api?
No, we have an script for that:
https://github.com/phalcon/docs/blob/master/scripts/gen-api.php
And another to generate the IDE stubs:
https://github.com/phalcon/phalcon-devtools/blob/master/ide/gen-stubs.php
lol :D I don't mean documentation. You said you wrote the phalcon kernel so you can write php code and easily port it to c aka the phalcon kernel. This php -> phalcon kernel c - is this done by hand or do you have a tool that scans the php code and translates it into phalcon kernel c code?