Hehehe so true. We use some odbc driver at my company and it had major memory leaks / seg faults. I had to compile debug versions and test it out to figure out what was going on. That being said, some PHP modules are really great and would be hard to live without. I need mysql, memcached, apc, json_decode, etc... I guess the extensions I've written myself I could rewrite to some hip hop spec?
> not including apc which shouldn't be necessary anymore
APC is a bit more than an opcode cache. It can be used like memcache, although restricted to the machine it's running on. It's my understanding that it is a part of hhvm?
If a VM makes them design sane consistent and useable versions of those plugins from the ground up PHP may be improved as a result.