[development] Eliminate hooks entirely in Drupal 6

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

Gabor Hojtsy wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Jan 2007, Earl Miles wrote:
>> The $file would be a file that should live in the same directory as 
>> the .module file and tells the system which file to conditionally load 
>> when that callback is invoked. This is one of the things that creates 
>> a big advantage in this system: We could move callbacks into 
>> conditionally loaded files, allowing Drupal's minimum per-page 
>> codesize to be smaller. The 'nodeapi' hook is not run for every page 
>> load, but because hooks are anonymous right now, that code *must* be 
>> present.
> 
> Well, I am increasingly adopting a similar coding practice. A few days 
> ago, I also split up archive.module into a small stub which registers 
> the menu item and has a page callback, and then that page callback 
> includes archive.inc which contains all the magic to display an archive 
> page.

Can I just quickly claim prior art for this ;-?

http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/modules/notify/notify.module?rev=2.54&view=markup

> This does eliminate a great deal of parsing for PHP. Although we 
> use an opcode cache here, we observed greatly reduced memory usage if we 
> take care of doing our own modules this way. (I don't have hard numbers 
> unfortunately).

The problem with this approach is that it needs to be finetuned for 
every module. For most modules you can safely but admin related stuff 
into an .inc file, sometimes you can put other stuff into an .inc too.

The ultimate vesion of this was Karoly's split patch, which he has 
abandoned.

I think it would be intersting to learn about any advantage this idea 
has even if you use APC.

Cheers,
	Gerhard