John points out it is required before hooks are available. Also, it was deemed not as good for performance to look for hooks, and better for performance to only look for one specific function. With the code registry in Drupal 7, the modules defining hooks are pre-parsed, so we'd know a list of functions to call from that cache. That might mitigate the performance problems. Would probably need to be benchmarked (invoke hook with one implementation vs. invoke the well-known-named function). For API consistency, I agree that making this a hook would be better, if you can make it work early enough in the bootstrap :) Gábor On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 3:17 PM, Steven Surowiec <steven@digitalpulp.com> wrote:

I've working on a custom module for a project that makes use of custom_url_rewrite to open up linking shortcuts through the url() function and I was wondering if there is any specific reason this functionality isn't a regular hook? I know I could probably use URL aliases for what I'm trying to do but requires me to not have to worry about managing hundreds, possibly thousands, of URL aliases just to open up this type of functionality. Maybe I'm just mis-using this functionality but it seems like it might be worth while to consider.