Thread:Talk:Release Management RFP/NicheWork and Hallo Welt!/Release Management and Visual Editor/reply (8)

Just a note on the Parsoid plans: We are working towards HTML-only MediaWiki roughly following the roadmap at Parsoid/Roadmap. At some point, Parsoid will no longer be needed for new wikis without wikitext-based templates.

For existing wikis with wikitext-based templating (including Lua etc) we will however still need to have Parsoid around for a long time.

With the emergence of cheap (~ $7 / month for 1G RAM) VMs the market for hosting has shifted a lot in the last years. Most users of such VMs would be much better served with a proper Debian package ('apt-get install mediawiki') that installs and configures a basic set of dependencies including memcached, the PHP Lua extension, Parsoid and Varnish. Similar packaging could be done for popular one-click installers in admin panels. Specialized wiki hosters already have the resources and motivation to set all this up manually.

A PHP port of Parsoid would at best deliver a terribly slow parser that nobody would want to use, especially not on resource-limited shared hosting installs it would supposedly serve. In most benchmarks PHP is at least an order of magnitude slower than V8.