> Given the complexity of Wikipedia's deployment compared to a typical MediaWiki installation, it really wouldn't be much effort to hook into a parser in say, Java rather than PHP...
No doubt the incremental complexity for Wikipedia would be small in relative terms. I assume that argument would support a variety of proposals.
A solid scanner and parser in C/C++ would benefit a broader audience though. All the major scripting languages can be extended in C/C++. In fact, the ragel-based parser I mentioned earlier [1] was built to be used from within Ruby code.
Of course, a PHP parser would still have to be maintained in parallel as not everyone would be able to do the Java option.