<HTML ><HEAD ><TITLE >The Zend Engine</TITLE ><META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Modular DocBook HTML Stylesheet Version 1.7"><LINK REL="HOME" TITLE="PHP Manual" HREF="index.html"><LINK REL="UP" TITLE="Extension Possibilities" HREF="zend.possibilities.html"><LINK REL="PREVIOUS" TITLE="Built-in Modules" HREF="zend.possibilities.builtin.html"><LINK REL="NEXT" TITLE="Source Layout" HREF="zend.layout.html"><META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"></HEAD ><BODY CLASS="section" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#0000FF" VLINK="#840084" ALINK="#0000FF" ><DIV CLASS="NAVHEADER" ><TABLE SUMMARY="Header navigation table" WIDTH="100%" BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0" ><TR ><TH COLSPAN="3" ALIGN="center" >PHP Manual</TH ></TR ><TR ><TD WIDTH="10%" ALIGN="left" VALIGN="bottom" ><A HREF="zend.possibilities.builtin.html" ACCESSKEY="P" >Prev</A ></TD ><TD WIDTH="80%" ALIGN="center" VALIGN="bottom" >Chapter 25. Extension Possibilities</TD ><TD WIDTH="10%" ALIGN="right" VALIGN="bottom" ><A HREF="zend.layout.html" ACCESSKEY="N" >Next</A ></TD ></TR ></TABLE ><HR ALIGN="LEFT" WIDTH="100%"></DIV ><DIV CLASS="section" ><H1 CLASS="section" ><A NAME="zend.possibilities.engine" ></A >The Zend Engine</H1 ><P > Of course, extensions can also be implemented directly in the Zend engine. This strategy is good if you need a change in the language behavior or require special functions to be built directly into the language core. In general, however, modifications to the Zend engine should be avoided. Changes here result in incompatibilities with the rest of the world, and hardly anyone will ever adapt to specially patched Zend engines. Modifications can't be detached from the main PHP sources and are overridden with the next update using the "official" source repositories. Therefore, this method is generally considered bad practice and, due to its rarity, is not covered in this book. </P ></DIV ><DIV CLASS="NAVFOOTER" ><HR ALIGN="LEFT" WIDTH="100%"><TABLE SUMMARY="Footer navigation table" WIDTH="100%" BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0" ><TR ><TD WIDTH="33%" ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" ><A HREF="zend.possibilities.builtin.html" ACCESSKEY="P" >Prev</A ></TD ><TD WIDTH="34%" ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" ><A HREF="index.html" ACCESSKEY="H" >Home</A ></TD ><TD WIDTH="33%" ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" ><A HREF="zend.layout.html" ACCESSKEY="N" >Next</A ></TD ></TR ><TR ><TD WIDTH="33%" ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" >Built-in Modules</TD ><TD WIDTH="34%" ALIGN="center" VALIGN="top" ><A HREF="zend.possibilities.html" ACCESSKEY="U" >Up</A ></TD ><TD WIDTH="33%" ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" >Source Layout</TD ></TR ></TABLE ></DIV ></BODY ></HTML >