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I disagree. Currently there is no standards body that defines what is PHP, and thus the "official" PHP runtime is "simply" another runtime like HHVM (and others

by RobAley 13y ago

I disagree. Currently there is no standards body that defines what is PHP, and thus the "official" PHP runtime is "simply" another runtime like HHVM (and others) that implements what it considers to be PHP. It's taken as the "defacto" standard simply as it was the first, and still largest supported, PHP implementation. There is currently talk on PHP Internals (as there has been for some time, to be fair), of creating a PHP standards body to dictate the language. The "official" PHP runtime will (probably) then be written to that standard, and any other runtimes can conform to the standard (and be a "PHP runtime" as you define it) or not as they wish.

kbenson 13y ago
If a language developed as a runtime, and no standard has yet been defined for exactly how the language will behave, then that runtime IS the spec. See Perl. In the meantime, if HHVM doesn't conform to some version of the PHP runtime, it doesn't conform to the PHP language (of the same version). The community could change this, either through defining a standard or accepting HHVM as close enough to be considered a PHP dialect, not a different language with similarities.
- RobAley 13y ago
  > If a language developed as a runtime, and no standard has yet been defined for exactly how the language will behave, then that runtime IS the spec. See Perl. Nope, it simply means that there is no spec.