PHP Extensions

With the modern 7.x and later PHP codebase writing a fully self-contained extension is much easier than it was on the older 5.x codebase, however most tutorials and even most books still rely on the older phpize based approach which generates literally megabytes of automated scripting.

Using php-config directly allows for much smaller, more readable Makefile creation, without relying on large automake and related scripting to compile what is often only a handful of source files.

What is wdf85?

The name is based on a typography failure I've encountered with my actual name "Wolf" where the "ol" sequence failed to kern correctly because a much older FreeType library was installed with all the expired patent concerns still enabled.

The actual tool itself is a minor variant on Ascii85 encoding, adjusting the output character map to make it cookie safe by adding characters unused in the default Ascii85 encoding to replace earlier ones.

A single strtr() call on the "encoded" state can convert the output to normal Ascii85 encoding if needed. Otherwise this is merely a 'fully functional toy' to aide in showing how this approach using a classical Makefile would work while still including full validation and code coverage tests.