Random? This is a one-of-a-kind (AFAIK) tool for managing VirtualBox over the web. The fact that it is PHP is less important than that it exists at all and will be useful to many people who manage VirtualBox running on a server without a GUI.
Actually, Apple allows interpreted code under certain circumstances. Link provides more details. I'm not sure how helpful it would be in this case, though. My understanding is that the main motivation for having scripted languages as a small part of an app, as this rule allows, is for game engines which have high-performance graphics stuff in C, and some of the application logic in a language like Lua. The use of a scripting language can reduce development time, but if you were using C, you might as well compile it.
That would kind of defy the whole premise of this thing wouldn't it? The biggest and most sought after "feature" of C is it's speed and direct memory access (and simplicity, I guess).
Depends on the application, but I could see some mixture of: 1) familiarity; 2) simplicity; and 3) minimal memory usage. Browsing the source code briefly, it really does look like it's an interpreter, with C structs representing Variables, Expressions, and so on.
You simply need to verify each access before allowing it, much like Valgrind does.
Of course it's quite costly do to so, and since C gives the programmer a lot of freedom I guess it's hard to optimize the tests, i.e. to know which accesses are safe without explicitly keeping track.
inotify is also unable to inherit handlers.
after a "mkdir -p a/b/c/d" it is very likely that "d" is untracked.
therefore lsyncd is useless on real systems. :(
