PHP Core Roundup #11

Welcome to the eleventh post in the PHP Core Roundup series. Just like the previous months, March was an eventful month with new RFCs, discussions, and plenty of other developments in PHP.

The PHP Foundation currently supports six part-time PHP contributors who work on maintenance and new features for PHP. Maintenance is not limited to fixing bugs, but also includes work to reduce technical debt, making life easier for everyone working on PHP. The contributors funded by the PHP Foundation collaborate with other contributors on code, documentation, and discussions.

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Call for PHP 8.3 Release Managers In Voting

In February, Sergey Panteleev — one of the PHP 8.2 release managers — called for volunteers to put their names forward to be the release managers for the upcoming PHP 8.3. Four volunteers stepped in for the three available positions, and a vote is currently under way.

Pierrick Charron, one of the PHP 8.2 release managers, volunteered to be the veteran release manager. Pierrick will be working with two newcomers to this position throughout the lifecycle of PHP 8.3.

For the rookie candidates, Eric Mann, Calvin Buckley, and Jakub Zelenka 💜 expressed their interest, and the vote will elect two release managers from this list of three.

Voting will be open until Apr 16, 2023.

PHP 8.2.4 and 8.1.17 Bug Fix Releases

PHP 8.2.4 and 8.1.17 are now released, both of which contain over 45 bug fixes (and no security fixes).

PHP 8.0 only receives security updates, so there is no corresponding release for PHP 8.0.

Recent RFCs and Mailing List Discussions

Changes and improvements to PHP are discussed, reported, and voted on by the PHP Foundation Team, the PHP development team, and contributors. Bug reports are made to the PHP issue tracker, changes are discussed in mailing lists, minor code changes are proposed as pull requests, and major changes are discussed in detail and voted on as PHP RFCs. Documentation and the php.net website changes are also discussed and improved at their relevant Git repositories on GitHub.

Hundreds of awesome PHP contributors put their efforts into improvements to the PHP code base, documentation, and the php.net website. Here is a summary of some changes made by the people behind PHP. Things marked with 💜 are done by the PHP Foundation team.

RFC Updates

Following are the RFCs and major pull-requests discussed, voted on, and implemented since our last update.

• RFC Implemented: Saner array_(sum|product)() by Gina Peter Banyard 💜

  Proposed to change the current behavior of array_sum and array_product to properly handle non-numeric values. This results in additional warnings when these functions encounter unsupported types such as certain objects, arrays, and resources. Further, it can result in different return values on objects that support arithmetic operations.

  This RFC was accepted, and the changes are now implemented in PHP 8.3.

• RFC Implemented: Typed class constants by Benas Seliuginas and Máté Kocsis 💜

  Despite the huge efforts put into improving the type system of PHP year after year, it was still not possible to declare constant types. This is less of a concern for global constants, but can indeed be a source of bugs and confusion for class constants: This RFC proposed to add support for declaring class, interface, trait, as well as enum constant types:

  enum E {
    const string TEST = "Test1";
  }
  
  trait T {
    const string TEST = E::TEST;
  }
  
  interface I {
    const string TEST = E::TEST;
  }
  
  class C {
    const string TEST = E::TEST;
  }
  

  
  

  This RFC was accepted, and the changes are now implemented in PHP 8.3.

• RFC In Voting : Arbitrary static variable initializers by Ilija Tovilo 💜

  PHP does not allow using arbitrary expressions in static variable initializers because the values are initialized at the compile time. This also lead to some unexpected behaviors when the same variable is initialized in more than once within the same scope.

  This RFC proposes to remove the current limitation of not allowing expressions in static variable initializers. It also forbids redeclaring static variables altogether.

  function foo() {
   static $i = getValue();
  }
  

  The code snippet will be allowed and functional in PHP 8.3 if the RFC is accepted. The RFC is currently under vote, and the current tally us an unanimous Yes.

• RFC Under Discussion: Make unserialize() emit a warning for trailing bytes by Tim Düsterhus

  This RFC proposes that unserialize() shall emit a new E_WARNING whenever the input string contains additional bytes once the unserialization parser terminates after successfully parsing a value. In other words: A warning shall be emitted if bytes can be removed from the end of the input string without changing the return value of unserialize().

• RFC Under Discussion: Define proper semantics for range() function by Gina Peter Banyard 💜

  This RFC attempts to iron out several undesirable and unexpected behaviors of the range() function. Introduced in PHP 4, range() function attempts to work with various types not only including integers, floats, and strings, but also other types. There are series of behaviors highlighted in the RFC along with several improvements proposed (throwing exceptions, emitting warnings, changing behaviors, etc).

Notable Mailing List Discussions

• Property Hooks Discussion
• First-class callable partial application
• Can we get compile time routines?
• RFC: code optimizations

Merged PRs and Commits

Following are some changes that did not go through an RFC process because they are either planned, bug fixes, or progressive enhancements. There are automated unit and integration tests for each of these changes, the PHP core developers review all pull requests.

Full list of commits since PHP Core Roundup #10

Support PHP Foundation

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PHP Roundup is prepared by Ayesh Karunaratne from PHP.Watch, a source for PHP News, Articles, Upcoming Changes, and more.