I believe this discussion is getting long because it seems that everybody is using a different meaning for "thin". In this context (and it is a personal interpr

I believe this discussion is getting long because it seems that everybody is using a different meaning for "thin". In this context (and it is a personal interpretation), a layer to interact with a C library is thin if there is not much code that separates a language to the other. In that regard it doesn't have anything to do with performance or memory footprint. If you take the way Java interacts with a C library you would see that there is a lot of code in between, that doesn't mean it is slower but it does mean it is thick in terms of the layer size. >but it seems very strange to say words that seem to imply that PHP is faster than Perl and Java because it is closer to C, I didn't imply that PHP is faster than Perl or Java. Just that PHP is thinner than them. However, this discussion is not going to be productive unless we all agree what we mean by a thin layer.