Talk:Language API

David, before documenting your proposed solution, please could you add a few words about the problem you are trying to solve. What is it about the current language file system that is not good enough?

Please remember that one of the things the current system does very well is performance. All it has to do is look in some directories then load some PHP files that just define some variables (which any good PHP accelerator will pre-compile for you). Also note that it takes care to only load the files needed by the current page, and only loads each file once, and remembers the results.

So if you are proposing a change, you may be expected to do before and after performance testing before the new system goes into core.