PHP: v8.js

> I have been doing a lot of work with PHP recently

If you've been doing a lot of work in PHP recently, then you should be compiling your own PHP. Which gives you the option of disabling every extension. The PHP core is actually very lean. Virtually everything is an extension. They even have a nifty flag to disable everything.

I like having the option of compiling a bazillion extensions in the binary if I want to. Even though I never enable anything beyond the basic stuff I need.

yes but that would require server to know that which again requires some sort of ajax which cannot happen because js is disabled!

Pretty mingtastic API for a first attempt, it's not safe, and is sure to suck performance wise, since all interaction must involve parsing an expression, and coercing any return value back to a PHP type, and with no way to maintain references to native JS objects.

I wouldn't object so much if only the PHP community weren't already known for their tendency to take a bad situation and make it worse: can't we learn from the history of mysql_query() and friends? Decades of SQL injections! There's no reason they couldn't provide a nice "JsObject" type supporting __call() and __get() to allow integration without resorting to interpolating bits of JavaScript code with (probably originating from a user) data, this way at least web developers would be safer from themselves.

Unfortunately, there are some bugs with the variable passing. You should be able to pass an array of variables to the V8js object and have access to them under PHP js object. However, the values are currently set to null.

In my experimentation I wanted to see [in php after js execution] all the variables created in the global scope. There are two ways to do it, pass the flag to the V8js constructor to make executeString return associative arrays and add "this;" to the tail of the scripts you execute. Or, append "JSON.stringify(this);" to the tail of the scripts.

The first method will return everything including references to print, var_dump, sleep and exit methods that are bridged from PHP.

The stringify method will give you just the variables without the method references but tends to leave you with empty arrays if all your array indices point to null values. Which is misleading if the result is "someVal: {}", verses "someVal: {'foo': null, 'bar': null}".

What it misses most, is the ability to bridge your own method calls. Would be nice to be able to register a method call in JS that executes a user defined PHP function.

That is a great idea, a scripting language riddled with design flaws integrated into a scripting language riddled with major design flaws, gaping security holes, a over-zealous and wrong tokenizer, extra transparent features that will fuck you over where they can, an incompetent maintainer, a terrible API..