PHP Internals News
Derick Rethans
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This is the 'PHP Internals News' podcast, where we discuss the latest PHP news, implementations, and issues with PHP internals developers and other guests.
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PHP Internals News: Episode 77: fsync: Buffers All The Way Down
PHP Internals News: Episode 77: fsync: Buffers All The Way Down
London, UK
Thursday, February 25th 2021, 09:05 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with David Gebler (GitHub) about his suggestion to add the fsync() function to PHP, as well as file and output buffers.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:13
Hi, I'm Derick. Welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to explaining the latest developments in the PHP language. This is Episode 77. In this episode I'm talking with David Gebler about an RFC that he's written to add a new function to PHP called fsync. David, would you please introduce yourself? David Gebler 0:35
Hi, I'm David. I've worked with PHP professionally among other languages as a developer of websites and back end services. I've been doing that for about 15 years now. I'm a new contributor to PHP core, fsync is my first RFC. Derick Rethans 0:48
What is the reason why you want to introduce fsync into the PHP language? David Gebler 0:52
It's an interesting question. I suppose in one sense, I've always felt that the absence of fsync and some interface to fsync is provided by most other high level languages, has always been something of an oversight in PHP. But the other reason was that it was an exercise for me in familiarizing myself with PHP's core getting to learn the source code, and it's a very small contribution, but it's one that I feel is potentially useful, and it was easy for me to do as a learning exercise. Derick Rethans 1:16
How did you find learning about PHP's internals? David Gebler 1:19
Quite the roller coaster. The PHP internals are very arcane I suppose I would say, it's it's something that's not particularly well documented. It's quite an interesting challenge to get into it. I think a lot of it you have to pick up from digging through the source code, looking at what's already been done, putting together the pieces, but there is a really great community on the internals list, and indeed elsewhere online, and I found a lot of people very helpful in answering questions and again giving feedback when I first opened my initial proof of concept PR Derick Rethans 1:48
Did you manage to find room 11 on Stack Overflow chat as well? David Gebler 1:52
I did not, no. Derick Rethans 1:53
I'll make sure to add a link in the show notes and it's where many of the PHP core contributors hang out quite a bit. David Gebler 2:00
Sounds good to know for the future. Derick Rethans 2:02
I read the RFC earlier today. And it talks about fsync, but it also talks about flush, or f-flush. What is the difference between them and what does fsync actually do? David Gebler 2:14
That's the question that will be on everyone's lips when they hear about this feature being introduced into the language, hopefully. What does fsync do and what does fflush do? To understand that we have to understand the concept of the different types of buffering, an application runs on a system. So we have the application or sometimes called the user space buffer, and we have the operating system kernel space buffer, Derick Rethans 2:36
And we're talking about writing to file here right? David Gebler 2:39
We're talking about writing to files with fflush and fsync yep. So fflush and fsync are both about getting data out to a file, and using it to push something out of the buffers. But there are two different types of buffers; we have the application buffers; we have the operating system buffers. What fflush does is it instructs PHP to flush its own internal buffers of data that's waiting to be written into a file out to the operating system. What it doesn't do is give us any guarantee that the operating system will actually write that data to disk, so the operating system has its own buffer as well. Computers like to be efficient, operating systems like to be efficient, they will save up disk writes and do them in the order they feel like at the time they feel like. What fsync does is it also instructs the operating system to flush its buffers out to disk, thus giving us some kind of better assurance that our data has actually reached disk by the point that function returns. Derick Rethans 3:29
I really only know about Linux here, but I know on Linux that there's a journal in the file system or, in most of the file systems that it uses. Would have seen make sure the data ends up in a journal, are also committed as how the file system does it itself? David Gebler 3:45
The manner in which fsync synchronizes is indeed dependent on the particular POSIX type operating system, and file system that it's running on. I think you're right in respect of modern Linux and ext4, that would ensure the journal was also updated and that the data was persisted to disk. Older versions may behave a little bit differently. And one thing to note with fsync is that you can't take it as a cast iron guarantee that the data has either basically been persisted to disk, or that the corresponding file system entries have been updated. It is the best assurance you can get that those things have happened, and by the point that function returns, again, in PHP implementation, you have a solid an assurance as you're going to get. Because that manner of synchronization is dependent on the underlying system. It can vary. Yeah Linux ext4 is probably your best bet with fsync, but one interesting thing to know if it does go into PHP and people start using it, is that when you call fsync on a file, if you want to ensure that the file system entries are properly updated as well, you should also call fsync or a handle to that file's containing directory. And of course on a Linux or POSIX type system you can do that you can you can fopen a directory, and you can then call a sync on that handle. Derick Rethans 5:02
You mentioned that you can call fsync on a file handle. How's it different than calling just fsync without an argument? Is fsync without an argument just telling the operating system to flush its current buffers, and fsync on a file handle specifically to flush that specific file, and its metadata? David Gebler 5:22
So in the PHP implementation of fsync, you must supply it with a stream resource that is plain File Stream. You can obviously at the PHP level give it some other kind of resource but it will return a warning if it's not able to convert that into a plain File Stream. Under the hood, when you're talking about C, underlying operating system level, fsync operates on a file descriptor so it doesn't even operate on a stream handle; it operates on the actual underlying number that represents the file at the operating system level. Derick Rethans 5:51
So that is different from the Unix shell command called fsync. David Gebler 5:55
It is different. Yep. Derick Rethans 5:57
The RFC also talks about another function called fdatasync. How's that different from fsync itself? David Gebler 6:03
I think that was a really good question because it's got two answers. It's got the theoretical answer and the practical answer. The practical answer is that these days, it most likely makes no difference at all. The theoretical answer is the fdatasync only pushed out the actual file data to a disk write, but it wouldn't necessarily update metadata about the file, such as the time it was last modified the data that might be stored in the file system about the file. The reality now is that most operating systems, we'll update both of those things at once. The reason they were separated out in the POSIX specification is because of course updating the metadata is another write, so a call to fsync could require two rights were call to fdatasync would only require one. I'm not aware of any operating system and file system now that I'm…
Feb 18, 2021
PHP Internals News: Episode 76: Deprecate null, and Array Unpacking
PHP Internals News: Episode 76: Deprecate null, and Array Unpacking
London, UK
Thursday, February 18th 2021, 09:04 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about two RFCs: Deprecate passing null to non-nullable arguments of internal functions, and Array Unpacking with String Keys.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:14
Hi I'm Derick. Welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to explain the latest developments in the PHP language. This is Episode 76. In this episode, I'm talking with Nikita Popov about a few more RFCs that he has been working on over the past few months. Nikita, would you please introduce yourself. Nikita Popov 0:34
Hi, I'm Nikita. I work on PHP core development on behalf of JetBrains. Derick Rethans 0:39
In the last few PHP releases PHP is handling of types with regards to internal functions and user land functions, has been getting closer and closer, especially with types now. But there's still one case where type mismatches behave differently between internal and user land functions. What is this outstanding difference? Nikita Popov 0:59
Since PHP 8.0 on the remaining difference is the handling of now. So PHP 7.0 introduced scalar types for user functions. But scalar types already existed for internal functions at that time. Unfortunately, or maybe like pragmatically, we ended up with slightly different behaviour in both cases. The difference is that user functions, don't accept null, unless you explicitly allow it using nullable type or using a null default value. So this is the case for all user types, regardless of where or how they occur as parameter types, return values, property types, and independent if it's an array type or integer type. For internal functions, there is this one exception where if you have a scalar type like Boolean, integer, float, or a string, and you're not using strict types, then these arguments also accept null values silently right now. So if you have a string argument and you pass null to it, then it will simply be converted into an empty string, or for integers into zero value. At least I assume that the reason why we're here is that the internal function behaviour existed for a long time, and the use of that behaviour was chosen to be consistent with the general behaviour of other types at the time. If you have an array type, it also doesn't accept now and just convert it to an empty array or something silly like that. So now we are left with this inconsistency. Derick Rethans 2:31
Is it also not possible for extensions to check whether null was passed, and then do a different behaviour like picking a default value? Nikita Popov 2:40
That's right, but that's a different case. The one I'm talking about is where you have a type like string, while the one you have in mind is where you effectively have a type like string or null. Derick Rethans 2:51
Okay. Nikita Popov 2:52
In that case, of course, accepting null is perfectly fine. Derick Rethans 2:56
Even though it might actually end up being different defaults. Nikita Popov 3:01
Yeah. Nowadays we would prefer to instead, actually specify a default value. Instead of using null, but using mull as a default and then assigning something else is also fine. Derick Rethans 3:13
What are you proposing to change here, or what are you trying to propose to change that into? Nikita Popov 3:18
To make the behaviour of user land and internal functions match, which means that internal functions will no longer accept null for scalar arguments. For now it's just a deprecation in PHP 8.1, and then of course later on that's going to become a type error. Derick Rethans 3:35
Have you checked, how many open source projects are going to have an issue with this? Nikita Popov 3:40
No, I haven't. Because it's not really possible to determine this using static analysis, or at least not robustly because usually null will be a runtime value. No one does this like intentionally calling strlen with a null argument, so it's like hard to detect this just through code analysis. I do think that this is actually a fairly high impact change. I remember that when PHP 7.2, I think, introduced to a warning for passing null to count(). That actually affected quite a bit of code, including things like Laravel for example. I do expect that similar things could happen here again so against have like strlen of null is pretty similar to count of null, but yeah that's why it's deprecation for now. So, it should be easy to at least see all the cases where it occurs and find out what should be fixed. Derick Rethans 4:35
What is the time frame of actually making this a type error? Nikita Popov 4:38
Unless it turns out that this has a larger impact than expected. Just going to be the next major version as usual so PHP 9. Derick Rethans 4:45
Which we expect to be about five years from now. Nikita Popov 4:49
Something like that, at least if we follow the usual cycle. Derick Rethans 4:52
Yes. Are there any other concerns for this one? Nikita Popov 4:55
No, not really. Derick Rethans 4:57
Maybe people don't realize it. Nikita Popov 4:58
Yeah, possibly. You can't predict these things, I mean like, this is going to have like way more practical impact for legacy code than the damn short tags. But for short tags, we get 200 mails and here we get not a lot. Derick Rethans 5:14
I think this low impact WordPress a lot. Nikita Popov 5:17
Possibly but at least the thing they've been complaining about is that something throws error without deprecation, and now they're getting the deprecation so everyone should be happy. Derick Rethans 5:28
Which is to be fair I think is a valid concern. Nikita Popov 5:30
Yes, it is. I've actually been thinking if we should like backport some deprecations to PHP 7.4 under an INI flag. Not like my favourite thing to work on, but people did complain? Derick Rethans 5:47
Which ones would you put in there? Nikita Popov 5:48
I think generally some cases where things went from no diagnostics to error. I think something that's mentioned this vprintf and round, and possibly the changes to comparison semantics. I did have a patch that like throws a deprecation warning, when that changes and that sort of something that could be included. Derick Rethans 6:12
I would say that if we were in January 2020 here, when these things popped up, then probably would have made sense to add these warnings and deprecations behind the flag for PHP seven four, but because we've now have done 15 releases of it, I'm not sure how useful this is now to do. Nikita Popov 6:30
I guess people are going to be upgrading for a long time still. I don't know I actually not sure about how, like distros, for example Ubuntu LTS update PHP seven four. If they actually follow the patch releases, because if they don't, then this is just going to be useless. Derick Rethans 6:48
Oh there's that. Yeah. Derick Rethans 6:50
There is one more RFC that I would like to talk to you about, which is the array unpacking with string keys RFC. That's quite a mouthful. What does the background story here? Nikita Popov 7:00
The background is that we have unpacking in calls. If you have the arguments for the call in an array, then you write the three dots, and the array is unpacked into actual arguments. Derick Rethans 7:14
I'd love to call it the splat operator. Nikita Popov 7:16
Yes, it is also lovingly called the splat operator. And I think it has a couple more names. So then, PHP 7.4 added the same support in arrays, in which case it means that you effectively merge, one array to the other one. Both call unpacking and array unpacking, at the time, we're limited to only integer keys, b…
Feb 11, 2021
PHP Internals News: Episode 75: Globals, and Phasing Out Serializable
PHP Internals News: Episode 75: Globals, and Phasing Out Serializable
London, UK
Thursday, February 11th 2021, 09:03 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about two RFCs: Restrict Globals Usage, and Phase Out Serializable.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:14
Hi I'm Derick. Welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to explain the latest developments in the PHP language. This is Episode 75. In this episode, I'm talking with Nikita Popov about a few RFCs that he has been working on over the past few months. Nikita, would you please introduce yourself? Nikita Popov 0:34
Hi, I'm Nikita, I work at JetBrains on PHP core development and as such I get to occasionally, write PHP proposals RFCs and then talk with Derick about them. Derick Rethans 0:47
The main idea behind you working on RFCs is that PHP gets new features not, you end up talking to me. Nikita Popov 0:53
I mean that's a side benefit, Derick Rethans 0:55
In any case we have a few to go this time. The first RFC is titled phasing out Serializable, it's a fairly small RFC. What is it about? Nikita Popov 1:04
That finishes up a bit of work from PHP 7.4, where we introduced a new serialization mechanism, actually the third one, we have. So we have a bit too many of them, and this removes the most problematic one. Derick Rethans 1:19
Which three Serializable methods or ways of doing things currently exist? Nikita Popov 1:24
The first one, which doesn't really count is just what you get if you don't do anything, so just all the Object Properties get serialized, and also unserialized, and then we have a number of hooks, you can use to modify that. The first pair is sleep and wake up. Sleep specifies which properties you want to serialize so you can filter out some of them, and wake up allows you to run some code, after unserialization, so you can do some kind of fix up afterwards. Derick Rethans 1:52
From what I remember, if you use unserialize, where does the wake up the constructor doesn't get called? Nikita Popov 1:59
During unserialization the constructor, never gets called. Derick Rethans 2:03
So wake up a sort of the static factory methods to re rehydrate the objects. Nikita Popov 2:08
Exactly. Derick Rethans 2:08
So that's number one, Nikita Popov 2:10
Then number two is the Serializable interface, which gives you more control. Namely, you have to actually like return the serialized representation of your object. How it looks like is completely unspecified, you could return whatever you want, though, in practice, what people actually do is to recursively call serialize. And then on the other side when unserializing you usually do the same so you call unserialize on the stream you receive, and then populate your properties based on that. The problem with this mechanism is exactly this recursive serialization call, because it has to share state, with the main serialization. And the reason for that is that, well PHP has objects, or object identity. So if you use the same object in two places you really want it to be the same object and not two objects with the same content. Serializable has to be able to preserve that, and that requires that it runs in the middle of the unserialization. Derick Rethans 3:14
Not sure if I follow that bit. Nikita Popov 3:16
Well maybe it's not a hard requirement more like an issue with our serialization format that comes into play here. Way PHP implements this, is using back references. So at first unserializes an object and then later you can have like a pointer back to it, that says like, I want to use the same object as at position number, 10, or so. For these back references to work, we have to actually execute the serialization handler while unserializing because otherwise the offsets will no longer match. So we can just run this at the end of unserialization for example because then our offsets would be incorrect. And this is a big problem because it's not really safe to run code, during unserialization because things are partially initialized. To make these back references work, PHP has to actually store pointers to these objects. And if you somehow modify things in specific ways, then these pointers become invalid. They point to a memory that no longer exists, and a possibly exploitable crash. This is why we would like to get rid of this mechanism. Derick Rethans 4:25
But of course, in order to get rid of things, we had to have a better way of doing things in place first, right, which came with PHP seven four. Nikita Popov 4:32
That's right. Derick Rethans 4:32
So that's number three. Nikita Popov 4:34
That's number three. Number three is actually very similar to number one: two new magic methods, double underscore serialize and double underscore unserialize. Serialize returns an array, usually like an array of properties for example, and then unserialize populates the object from that array. In practice, this works very similar to the Serializable interface, just that you don't manually call serialize and unserialize, but PHP will do so on your behalf. So you just return an array or get an array, and PHP will integrate that into the like main serialization, and because it's left to PHP, PHP can control where these calls occur. Derick Rethans 5:19
With sleep originally you only return the name of the properties. Whereas with this new interface you return the names of the properties but also their values. Nikita Popov 5:30
That's right. The new mechanism, this, like, in practice, it serves as a replacement for the Serializable interface. But from a technical side it's really close to sleep and wake up, um, just that, as you said, instead of returning property names you return both names and values. Derick Rethans 5:51
And this is now the recommended way of doing serialization. Nikita Popov 5:54
Like the motivation is one problem was, what I mentioned the security problem. Maybe the thing that impacts users more commonly is that things like calling parent::serialize and parent::unserialize with the Serializable interface, usually doesn't do what you want. Again, due to these back references because, like, the calls get out of order, we should do the same thing with the magic methods, with the underscore underscore serialize and unserialize and you can safely call parent methods and compose serialization in that way. Derick Rethans 6:29
That's our state of serialization right now. We haven't spoken about RFC, what are you proposing to do here? Nikita Popov 6:34
The RFC proposes to get rid of the Serializable interface. And, like in a way that is a bit more graceful than just deprecating it outright. And the idea is that if you have code that is still compatible with PHP 7.3, where the new mechanism doesn't exist, you probably still want to use Serializable. So if we just deprecated out right that would be fairly annoying to have code that's compatible with PHP 7.3, and 8.1. So instead what we do is we only deprecate the case where you implement Serializable without implementing the new mechanism. If you implement both of them, then you're fine for now. Derick Rethans 7:15
The new mechanism, the one we're introducing PHP 7.4, would overrides the PHP 7.3 one already anyway. Nikita Popov 7:22
Exactly. So on PHP 7.3 you would end up using Serializable and PHP seven four and higher, you would be using the new mechanism. And then, at a later point in time we would actually also deprecate Serializable itself and then remove it, though, like based on mailing list response, some people at least didn't like the long timeline. I'm not exactly sure what the alternative is, so either to deprecate Serializable right away, or to late…
Feb 4, 2021
PHP Internals News: Episode 74: Fibers
PHP Internals News: Episode 74: Fibers
London, UK
Thursday, February 4th 2021, 09:02 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with Aaron Piotrowski (Twitter, Website, GitHub) about an RFC that he is proposing to add Fibers to PHP.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:14
Hi I'm Derick. Welcome to PHP internals news, the podcast dedicated to explaining the latest developments in the PHP language. This is Episode 74. Today I'm talking with Aaron Piotrowski about a Fiber RFC, that he's working on together with Nicolas Keller. Aaron, would you please introduce yourself. Aaron Piotrowski 0:33
Hi everyone I'm Aaron Piotrowski, I started programming with PHP back in 1998 with PHP three, so I've just dated myself there but, but I've worked with a lot of different languages over the last few decades but PHP is always continually remaining, one of my favourite and I'm always drawn back to it. I've gotten a lot more involved with the PHP projects since PHP seven. The Fiber RFC is my first major contribution I have attempted though. In the past I did the RFC for the throwable exception hierarchy. And the Iterable pseudo type in PHP 7.1. Derick Rethans 1:12
Yeah, these things are both before I started doing the podcast so hence we haven't spoken yet, at least on here. We've actually met at some point in the past. I've had a read through the Fiber RFC this morning, but I'm still fairly baffled. Could you perhaps explain in short what Fibers are where the idea comes from. And what's your specific interest is in adding them to PHP? Aaron Piotrowski 1:35
A few other languages already have Fibers like Ruby, and they're sort of similar to threads in that they contain a separate call stack, and a separate memory stack, but they differ from threads in that they exist only within a single process, and that they have to be switched to cooperatively by that process rather than actively by the OS like threads. So sometimes they're called Green threads, and the generators that are in PHP already are actually somewhat similar to Fibers; but generators differ in that they're stack less. And so what that means is that generator function can only be interrupted at one layer. Whereas a Fiber can be interrupted anywhere in the call stack. So like it'd be imagine if you had a generator where yield could be very deep in a function call. Rather than at the top level. Like, how generators can be used to make interruptible functions, Fibers can also be used to create similarly interruptible functions, but with again without having to know exactly when it's going to be interrupted not at the top level but at any point in the call stack. And so the main motivation behind wanting to add this feature is to make asynchronous programming in PHP much easier and eliminate the distinction that usually exists between async code that has used promises and synchronous code that we're all used to. Derick Rethans 3:09
So what specifically are you proposing to ask to PHP here then? Aaron Piotrowski 3:12
Specifically I'm looking at adding a low level Fiber API, that's really aimed specifically at async framework authors to create their own more opinionated API's on top of that low level API. So adds just a couple of classes: Fiber, and a FiberScheduler on within a couple of exception classes and reflection classes for inspecting Fibers. When a Fiber is suspended to the execution switch is to FiberScheduler, which is then a special Fiber, that's able to start and resume, regular user Fibers. So a Fiber scheduler is generally going to be something like an event loop that then, when a Fiber is suspended that our scheduler event loop will resume certain Fibers, like in response to events like data becoming available on a socket or like a timer expiring. Derick Rethans 4:17
How would the event loop, decide which Fiber to resume, depending on on input, for example? Aaron Piotrowski 4:24
It's largely up to, how like that framework choose to write that event loop, but in general, like when a Fiber is going to suspend it'll set up some sort of callback, or add it to like an array of Fibers that's waiting on events, and when execution switches to the event loop. Derick Rethans 4:44
A Fiber before it suspends itself set up add another Fiber to the scheduler. Aaron Piotrowski 4:48
That's exactly right. Before a Fiber suspends itself it adds itself to some sort of event in the event loop that when it triggers, it will resume that Fiber. So, if you're familiar with how some of the other async frameworks that work now they'll add something like a callback or promise to the event loop that's resolved. This is sort of working the same way except that it's just resuming a Fiber that of like invoke a callback, although you know that Fiber might be resumed and by invoking a callback. Derick Rethans 5:23
Is the Fiber scheduler or the event loop as however if you want to call it, is that something you would, or can also make use of in a normal PHP applications, I mean by normal I mean, not like an async PHP framework? Is that the intention is all? Aaron Piotrowski 5:39
Using Fibers than kind of helps you eliminate that boundary that that exists, trying to put asynchronous code into something using synchronous code because you end up with a promise that you have to await in that doesn't really work very well, where you're trying to mix it with sync code, Fibers eliminate the need for a promise. Since, the asynchronous function can still return types, you can mix async code into a traditional like sync application, even like something running in Nginx or Apache, it doesn't have to be a fully asynchronous app to make use now of some async I/O. Derick Rethans 6:23
For example if he wants to do multiple database calls at the same time. Will you be able to use a uses for that? Aaron Piotrowski 6:30
Exactly. Derick Rethans 6:31
If a user would have a PHP application and want to use multiple database calls at the same time, how would, how would they set it up it with Fibers and Fibers scheduler? Aaron Piotrowski 6:40
This is a low level API is aimed primarily at like a framework author. Generally if you're writing application with it, you're probably going to use one of those frameworks so it would largely depends on how that framework would set that up. Although, in general, those frameworks are going to provide some sort of abstraction for running code concurrently, that they probably have their own sort of placeholder object like like a promise again. So that when you start running things concurrently, they return to something that you can then wait on for all those things to end up, or when those things, complete executing. So it doesn't totally eliminate the need for promises, but it does allow for both to do not always that async to not always have to return a promise rather a promise is only required when you want concurrency, and that, you know, a framework will provide tools to await that can still be mixed in with synchronous code. Derick Rethans 7:48
Do I understand this correctly that you won't need to promise unless you mix it with synchronous code? Aaron Piotrowski 7:54
You won't need a promise unless you explicitly need concurrency. Derick Rethans 7:57
Okay, that makes more sense I suppose. Aaron Piotrowski 7:59
It's difficult to explain it's so much easier with examples. Derick Rethans 8:03
Yeah but examples are very difficult to do in audio only. Aaron Piotrowski 8:07
Yes, exactly. You have like a database query that returns a result. If you want to run multiple queries at the same time, the async library that uses Fibers underneath would be able to provide an abstraction that would allow you to run multiple queries at once. But that those…
Jan 28, 2021
PHP Internals News: Episode 73: Enumerations
PHP Internals News: Episode 73: Enumerations
London, UK
Thursday, January 28th 2021, 09:01 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with Larry Garfield (Twitter, Website, GitHub) about a new RFC that he is proposing together with Ilija Tovilo: Enumerations.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:14
Hi I'm Derick and welcome to PHP internals news that podcast dedicated to explain the latest developments in the PHP language. Derick Rethans 0:22
This is Episode 73. Today I'm talking with Larry Garfield, who you might recognize from hits such as object ergonomics and short functions. Larry has worked together with Ilija Tovilo on an RFC titled enumerations, and I hope that Larry will explain to me what this is all about. Larry, would you please introduce yourself? Larry Garfield 0:43
Hello World, I'm Larry Garfield, I am director of developer experience at platform.sh. We're a continuous deployment cloud hosting company. I've been in and around PHP for 20, some odd years now. And mostly as an annoying gadfly and pedant. Derick Rethans 1:00
Well you say that but in the last few years you've been working together with other people on several RFCs right, so you're not really sitting as a fly on the wall any more, you're being actively participating now, which is why I end up talking to you now which is quite good isn't it. Larry Garfield 1:15
I'm not sure if the causal relationship is in that direction. Derick Rethans 1:18
In any case we are talking about enumerations or enums today. What are enumerations or enums? Larry Garfield 1:26
Enumerations or enums are a feature of a lot of programming languages, what they look like varies a lot depending on the language, but the basic concept is creating a type that has a fixed finite set of possible values. The classic example is Boolean; a Boolean is a type that has two and only two possible values: true and false. Enumerations are way to let you define your own types like that to say this type has two values, sort ascending or descending. This type has four values, for the four different card suits in a standard card deck, or a user can be in one of four states: pending, approved, cancelled, or active. And so those are the four possible values that this variable type can have. And what that looks like varies widely depending on the language. In a language like C or c++, it's just a thin layer on top of integer constants, which means they get compiled away to integers at compile time and they don't actually do all that much, they're a little bit to help for reading. At the other end of the spectrum, you have languages like rust or Swift, where enumerations are a robust Advanced Data Type, and data construct of their own. That also supports algebraic data types, we'll get into that a bit more later. And is a core part of how a lot of the system actually works in practice, and a lot of other languages are somewhere in the middle. Our goal with this RFC, is to give PHP more towards the advanced end of enumerations, because there are perfectly good use cases for it so let's not cheap out on it. Derick Rethans 3:14
What is the syntax? Larry Garfield 3:15
Syntax we're proposing is tied into the fact that enumerations as we're implementing them, are a layer on top of objects, they are internally objects with some limitations on them to make them enumeration like. The syntax is if I can do this verbally: enum, curly brace, a list of case foo statements, so case ascending, case descending, case hearts, case spades, case clubs, space diamonds, and so on. And then possibly a list of methods, and then the closed curly brace. So it looks an awful lot like a class because internally, the way that we're implementing them, the enum type itself is a class, it compiles down to a class inside the engine, but instead of being able to instantiate your own instances of it. There are a fixed number of instances that are pre created. And those are the only instances that are ever allowed to exist. And those are assigned to constants on that class, and you have the user status, then you have a user status enum, which has a case approved, or active, and therefore there is in the engine, a class user status which has a constant on it, public constant named approved, whose value is an instance of that object. And then you can use that like a constant, pretty much anywhere and it will just work. The advantage of that over just using an object like we're used to, is you can now type a parameter, or a property or return type for: This is going to return a user status, which means you're guaranteed by the syntax that what you get back from that method is going to be one of those four value objects, each of which are Singleton's so they will always identity compare against each other. Larry Garfield 5:07
So just like if you type something as Boolean, you know, the only cases you ever have to consider are true and false. If you type something as user status, you know, there are only four possible cases you ever have to think about, and you know exactly what they mean and you can document them, and you don't need to worry about what if someone passes in, you know, a string that says cancelled instead of rejected or something like that. That's syntactically impossible. Derick Rethans 5:32
What happens if you do that? Larry Garfield 5:33
You get a syntax error. If for example, a method is typed as having a parameter that takes a user status and you pass in the string rejected. Well, it's a string but what's expected is a user status object. So it's going to type error. Derick Rethans 5:47
You get a type error yes. Larry Garfield 5:49
If you try and pass in user status, double colon rejected, when that's not a type, you get an error because there is no constant on that class named rejected therefore, you'll get that error instead. Building on top of objects means an awful lot of functionality, kind of happens automatically. And the error checking you want to kind of happens automatically. And it's in ways that you're already used to working with variables in PHP. Derick Rethans 6:14
For example, it also means that enums will be able to be auto loaded because they're pretty much a class? Larry Garfield 6:19
Exactly. They autoload exactly the same way as classes, you don't you didn't even do anything different with them just follow the standard PSR four you're already following, and they'll auto load like everything else. Derick Rethans 6:28
That also means that class names and enum names, share the same namespace then? You can't have an enum with the same name as a class. Larry Garfield 6:36
Right. Again, making it built on classes means all of these. So it's kind of like a class, the answer is yes, almost always, and it makes it easier to work with is more convenient, it's like you're used to. Derick Rethans 6:47
I suppose it's also makes it easier to implement? Larry Garfield 6:50
Substantially. Derick Rethans 6:51
I'm familiar with enums in C, or c++ where enums is basically just a way of creating a list of integers, that's auto increase right, then I've been reading the RFC, it doesn't seem to do anything like that. How does this work, are the constants on the enums classes, are they sort of backed by static values as well? Larry Garfield 7:12
They can be. There's some subtlety here that's one of the last little bits we're still ironing out as we record this, the user status active constant is backed by an object that is an instance of user status and has a hard coded name property on it, called active. That is public but read only. That's how internally in the engine, it keeps track of which one is which. And there is only ever that one instance of user status with the nam…
Nov 26, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 72: PHP 8.0 Celebrations!
PHP Internals News: Episode 72: PHP 8.0 Celebrations!
London, UK
Thursday, November 26th 2020, 09:35 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" we're looking back at all the RFCs that we discussed on this podcast for PHP 8.0. In their own words, the RFC authors explain what these features are, with your host interjecting his own comments on the state of affairs.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:23
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. Derick Rethans 0:32
This is Episode 72. PHP eight is going to be released today, November 26. In this episode, we look back across the season to find out which new features are in PHP eight dot zero. If I have spoken with the instigator of each of these features, I'm letting them explain what this new feature is. in the first episode of this current year, I spoke with Nikita Popov about weak maps, a feature that builds on top of the weak references that were introduced in PHP seven four. I asked: What's wrong with the weak references and why do we now need to weak maps. Nikita Popov 1:10
There's nothing wrong with references. This is a reminder, what weak references are about, they allow you to reference, an object, without preventing it from being garbage collected. So if the object is unset, then you're just left with a dangling reference, and if you try to access it you will get acknowledged sort of the object. Now the probably most common use case for any kind of weak data structure is a map or an associative array, where you have objects and want to associate some kind of data with some typical use cases are caches or other memoize data structures. And the reason why it's important for this to be weak, is that you do not. Well, if you want to cache some data with the object and then nobody else is using that object, you don't really want to keep around that cache data, because no one is ever going to use it again, and it's just going to take up memory usage. And this is what the weak map does. So you use objects as keys, use some kind of data as the value. And if the object is no longer used outside this map, then is also removed from the map as well. Derick Rethans 2:29
A main use case for weak maps will likely be ORMs and related tools. In the next, episode 38, I discussed this trainable interface with Nicolas Grekas from Symfony fame. I asked: Nicolas, could you explain what stringable is. Nicolas Grekas 2:45
Hello, and stringable is an interface that people could use to declare that they implement some the magic to string method. Derick Rethans 2:53
That was a short and sweet answer, but a reason for wanting to introduce this new interface was much more complicated, and are also potential issues with breaking backwards compatibility. Nikolas replied to my questioning about that with: Nicolas Grekas 3:06
That's another goal of the RFC; the way I've designed it is that I think the actual current code should be able to express the type right now using annotations, of course. So, what I mean is that the interface, the proposal, the stringable is very easily polyfilled, so we just create this interface in the global namespace that declare the method and done, so we can do that now, we can improve the typing's now. And then in the future, we'll be able to turn that into an actual union type. Derick Rethans 3:39
I had a chat with Nikita Popov about union types as part of the last season in Episode 33 before PHP seven four was released, but after the feature freeze for it happened. I happen to speak with Nikita quite a lot because he does so much work improving PHP. In episodes 40 and 43, we discussed a bunch of smaller features and tweaks to the language. First up was the static return type, Nikita explains: Nikita Popov 4:05
So PHP has a three magic special class names that's self for into the current class parent, refering to the parent class, and static, which is the late static binding class name. And that's very similar to self. If no inheritance is involved than static is the same as self, introducing refers to the current class. However, if the method is inherited. And you call this method on the child class. Then, self is still going to refer to the original class, the parent. Well static is going to refer to the class on which the method was actually called. Derick Rethans 4:50
Next, most the class name literal on objects, which adds the following: Nikita Popov 4:55
And that just returns to the fully qualified class name, for example, have a use statement for that class, you can get back the full name instead of the short name. I think we've had this since PHP five five. That's a great feature because it's like makes it clear whether you're referencing the class and not just some random string, and that means, for example, that the IDE refactorings can work better and so on. Derick Rethans 5:20
In PHP seven, we touched up inconsistencies in PHP is compound variable syntax, but we missed a few cases, Nikita explains: Nikita Popov 5:28
All of these remaining consistencies are like really really minor things and edge cases. But weirdly, all or at least most of them are something that someone that at some point ran into and either open the bug or wrote me an email, or on Twitter. So people somehow managed to still run into these things. Derick Rethans 5:56
But syntax changes are not the only thing that needs fixing; sometimes we also get the theory slightly wrong. In this case related to inconsistencies with traits, Nikita explains again: Nikita Popov 6:07
The problem is that traits are sometimes not self contained. So to give a specific example we have in the logger PSR. We have a trait called logger treat, which has a bunch of methods like: warning, error, info, notice, and so on. So we just simple helper methods which all call the log method with a specific log level, and this trait only specified these helper methods, but still requires the actual class to implement the log method that we usually indicate that is by adding an abstract method to the trait. You have all the methods you actually want to provide by the trait and to have a number of abstract methods that the trait itself requires to work. This already works fine. The problem is just that these methods are not actually validated, or they are all inconsistently validated. Even though the trait specifies this abstract method, you could implement it in the class with a completely different signature. Derick Rethans 7:09
Probably one of the big new features and PHP 8.0 are attributes, certainly the most discussed new feature with various RFCs to introduce a feature, and then change the syntax a few times. It all started with Benjamin Eberlei introducing a feature in April, ran Episode 47 I asked Benjamin, what attributes are. He replied: Benjamin Eberlei 7:30
They are a way to declare structured metadata on declarations of the language. So in PHP, or in my RFC, this would be classes, class properties, class constants, and regular functions. You could declare additional metadata there that sort of tags, those declarations with specific additional machine readable information. Derick Rethans 7:56
At the moment, many tools are already used up block comments to do a similar thing. So I asked how attributes are different. Benjamin answered with his first proposed syntax: Benjamin Eberlei 8:06
The idea is that we introduce a new syntax that is independent of the docblock comments. Essentially, before each declaration, you can use the lesser-than symbol twice, then the attribute declaration, and then the greater-than sign twice. This is the syntax, I've used from the previous attributes RFC. Dmitri at that…
Nov 19, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 71: What didn’t make it into PHP 8.0?
PHP Internals News: Episode 71: What didn’t make it into PHP 8.0?
London, UK
Thursday, November 19th 2020, 09:34 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" we're looking back at all the RFCs that we discussed on this podcast for PHP 7.4, but did not end up making the cut. In their own words, the RFC authors explain what these features are, with your host interjecting his own comments on the state of affairs.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:15
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 71. At the end of last year, I collected snippets from episodes about all the features that did not make it into PHP seven dot four, and I'm doing the same this time around. So welcome to this year's 'Which things were proposed to be included into PHP 8.0, but didn't make it. In Episode 41, I spoke with Stephen Wade about his two array RFC, a feature you wanted to add to PHP to scratch an itch. In his own words: Steven Wade 0:52
This is a feature that I've, I've kind of wish I would have been in the language for years, and talking with a few people who encouraged. It's kind of like the rule of starting a user group right, if there's not one and you have the desire, then you're the person to do it. A few people encouraged to say well why don't you go out and write it? So I've spent the last two years kind of trying to work up the courage or research it enough or make sure I write the RFC the proper way. And then also actually have the time to commit to writing it, and following up with any of the discussions as well. Steven Wade 1:20
I want to introduce a new magic method the as he said the name of the RFC is the double underscore to array. And so the idea is that you can cast an object, if your class implements this method, just like it would toString; if you cast it manually, to array then that method will be called if it's implemented, or as, as I said in the RFC, array functions will can can automatically cast that if you're not using strict types. Derick Rethans 1:44
I questioned him on potential negative feedback about the RFC, because it suggested to add a new metric method. He answered: Steven Wade 1:53
Beauty of PHP is in its simplicity. And so, adding more and more interfaces, kind of expands class declarations enforcement's, and in my opinion can lead to a lot of clutter. So I think PHP is already very magical, and the precedent has been set to add more magic to it with seven four with the introduction of serialize and unserialize magic methods. And so for me it's just kind of a, it's a tool. I don't think that it's necessarily a bad thing or a good thing it's just another option for the developer to use Derick Rethans 2:21
The RFC was not voted on and a feature henceforth did not make it into PHP eight zero. Derick Rethans 2:27
Operator overloading is a topic that has come up several times over the last 20 years that PHP has been around as even an extension that implements is in the PECL repository. Jan Bøhmer proposed to include user space based operator overloading for PHP eight dot zero. I asked him about a specific use cases: Jan Böhmer 2:46
Higher mathematical objects like complex numbers vectors, something like tensors, maybe something like the string component of Symfony, you can simply concatenate this string object with a normal string using the concat operator and doesn't have to use a function to cause this. Most basically this should behave, similar to a basic string variable or not, like, something completely different. Derick Rethans 3:16
For some issues raised during the RFC process and Jan explains to the most notable criticisms. Jan Böhmer 3:21
First of all, there are some principles of operator overloading in general. So there's also criticism that it could be used for doing some very weird things with operator overloading. There was mentioned C++ where the shift left shift operator is used for outputting a string to the console. Or you could do whatever you want inside this handler so if somebody would want to save files, or modify a file in inside an operator overloading wouldn't be possible. It's, in most cases, function will be more clear what it does. Derick Rethans 4:01
He also explained his main use case: Jan Böhmer 4:04
Operator overloading should, in my opinion, only be used for things that are related to math, or creating custom types that behave similar to build types. Derick Rethans 4:15
In the end, the operator overloading RFC was voted on. But ultimately declined, although there was a slim majority for it. Derick Rethans 4:24
In Episode 44, I spoke with Máté Kocsis about the right round properties RFC and asked him what the concept behind them was. He explained: Máté Kocsis 4:33
Write once properties can only be initialized, but not modified afterwards. So you can either define a default value for them, or assign them a value, but you can't modify them later, so any other attempts to modify, unset, increment, or decrement them would cause an exception to be thrown. Basically this RFC would bring Java's final properties, or C#'s read only properties to PHP. However, contrary to how these languages work, this RFC would allow lazy initialization, it means that these properties don't necessarily have to be initialized until the object construction ends, so you can do that later in the object's lifecycle. Derick Rethans 5:22
Write once properties was not the only concept that he had explored before writing this RFC. We discussed these in the same episode: Máté Kocsis 5:31
The first one was to follow Java and C# and require all right, once properties to be initialized until the object construction ends, and this is what we talked about before. The counter arguments were that it's not easy to implement in PHP, the approach is unnecessarily strict. The other possibility is to let unlimited writes to these properties, until object construction ends and then do not allow any writes, but positive effect of this solution is that it plays well with bigger class hierarchies, where possibly multiple constructors are involved, but it still has the same problems as the previous approach. And finally the property accessors could be an alternative to write once properties. Although, in my opinion, these two features are not really related to each other, but some say that property accessors could alone, prevent some unintended changes from the outside, and they say that maybe it might be enough. I don't share this sentiment. So, in my opinion, unintended changes can come from the inside, so from the private or protected scope, and it's really easy to circumvent visibility rules in PHP. There are quite some possibilities. That's why it's a good way to protect our invariance. Derick Rethans 7:02
In the end this RFC was the client, as it did not wait to two thirds majority required with an even split between the proponents and the opponents. Derick Rethans 7:11
Following on from Máté's proposal to add functionality to our object orientation syntax. I spoken Episode 49 with Jakob Givoni on a suggested addition COPA, or in full: contact object property assignments Jakob explains why he was suggesting to add this. Jakob Givoni 7:28
As always possible for a long time why PHP didn't have object literals, and I looked into it, and I saw that it was not for lack of trying. Eventually I decided to give it a go with a different approach. The basic problem is simply to be able to construct, populate, and send an object in one single expression in a block, also called inline. It can be like an alternative to an associative array: you give the data, a well defined structure, the si…
Nov 12, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 70: Explicit Octal Literal
PHP Internals News: Episode 70: Explicit Octal Literal
London, UK
Thursday, November 12th 2020, 09:33 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with George Peter Banyard (Website, Twitter, GitHub, GitLab) about an RFC that he has proposed to add an Explicit Octal Literal to PHP.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:15
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. Derick Rethans 0:24
This is Episode 70. Today I'm talking with George Peter Banyard, about a new RFC that he's just proposed for PHP 8.1, which is titled explicit octal literal. Hello George, would you please introduce yourself? George Peter Banyard 0:38
Hello Derick, I'm George Peter Banyard, I'm a student at Imperial College London, and I contribute to PHP in my free time. Derick Rethans 0:46
Excellent, and the contribution that you're currently have up is titled: explicit octal literal. What is the problem that this is trying to solve? George Peter Banyard 0:56
Currently in PHP, we have four types of integer literals. So decimal numbers, hexadecimal, binary, and octal. Decimal is just your normal decimal numbers; hexadecimal starts with 0x, and then hexadecimal characters so, null to nine and A to F, and then binary starts with 0b, and then it's only zeros and ones. However, octal notation is just a decimal, something which looks like a decimal number, which was a leading zero, which doesn't really look that much different than a decimal number, but it comes from the days from C and everything which just uses like a zero as a prefix. Derick Rethans 1:48
But I have seen is people using like array keys for the, for the month names right and they use 01, 02, 03, you get 07, and 08 and 09, and then they look at the arrays. They notice that they actually had the zeroth element in there but no, but no eight or nine. That's something that is that PHP no longer does I believe. No, it's mostly that the parser doesn't pick it up anymore. Instead of silently ignoring the eight, it'll just give you an error. You've mentioned that there's these four types of numbers with octal being the one started with zero. But what's the problem with is that a moment? George Peter Banyard 2:31
Sometimes when you want to use, which looks like decimal number. So, for example, you're trying to order months, and use like the full two digits for the month number, instead of just one, you use 01, as an array key. When you get to array, it will parse error because it can't pass 08 as an octal number, which is very confusing, because it. Most people don't deal with octal numbers that often, and you would expect everything to be decimal. Because numeric strings are always decimal, but not integers literals. So, the proposal is to add an explicit octal notation, which would be 0o. So python does that, JavaScript has it, Rust also has it, to allow like a by more explicit to say oh I'm dealing with an octal number here. This is intended. Derick Rethans 3:33
Beyond having the 0b for binary, and the 0x for hexadecimal, the addition of 0o for octal is the plan to add. And is that it? George Peter Banyard 3:45
That's more or less the proposal. It's non-BC, because the parser before would just parse or if you had 0o, so there's no PC very possible numeric strings are not affected because since PHP 7.0 hexadecimal strings are not handled anymore as numeric strings. Numeric strings will always be decimal integers, literals will have your four different variants, and maybe a future proposal is to deprecate the implicit octal notation to always make a decimal, even if you have leading zeros. Derick Rethans 4:21
At the moment, if I do as a string literal 014, and do an echo that I get 12. George Peter Banyard 4:27
Because then it's interpreted as an octal. The most bizarre example is if you do var_dump string of 014 double equal to 014, you will get false, because one is interpreted as well 14, like the numeric string is interpreted as 14, whereas the octal number, which says 014 as an integer literal is interpreted as an octal number, which is 12, which is slightly confusing for most people, because that also if you because PHP, most, we all deal with like HTTP requests, and I GET and POST a data, which everything is in strings because it's a text protocol. And if you get user output, which is like I don't know, naught 14 and you're, are you intending to compare munz numbers which are or. 01201, and then you get to array, well then you just fail. Derick Rethans 5:22
Of course, removing that support means a BC breaking change, which phones happen until PHP nine, of course, which might be a while away from now let's say that. George Peter Banyard 5:31
Probably five years, if we're going through the timelines from PHP seven to PHP 8, but to be able to deprecated and remove it. Well, you need to add support for something else. So that's more the long term plan. Derick Rethans 5:46
And your proposal is basically to make it equivalent to binary and hexadecimal numbers, so that it is less confusing in general. George Peter Banyard 5:55
Yes, that's why the RFC is very short. Derick Rethans 5:58
What are octal numbers actually used for? George Peter Banyard 6:02
The only practical use case that I've seen is for Linux permissions, so chmod. Execute read and write, are those who permissions which chmod will use an octal number. Derick Rethans 6:15
In a different order though but George Peter Banyard 6:17
Yes, I don't know chmod though on top of my heart. Derick Rethans 6:20
Is it only Linux permissions that you can think of? Is there anything else? I can't either so I'm asking you. George Peter Banyard 6:25
No, I can't. That's why I find it very odd that like the leading zero just makes it octal instead of anything else. I mean it has precedence because many other languages do that like C, Java, I don't know, many any language I suppose was just picked it up from. I think C. But when I looked into the history, weirdly enough before C. They had a prefix for like binary, octal, and dec, and hexadecimal. But then the one for octal just got dropped, for some reason. Derick Rethans 6:57
Maybe because the zero and the "o" next each other look very the same. We've already touched on whether there are BC breaks or not, BC standing for backwards compatibility. And, there shouldn't be any because it's something that a parser currently doesn't understand. But do other build-in extensions need to be modified for example? George Peter Banyard 7:18
We have two extensions, which one which deals with numbers, so which is GMP, which is arbitrary precision arithmetic. And then there's the filter extension to filter octal, which filters data and tells you if it's valid or not and it gives you back a, like a correct integer or something like that, which is the filter extension, which has an octal filter. Both of these extensions have been modified to support like the prefix notation, and interpreted as a valid octal number. And then we have like the function which is oct2dec, which is basically octal to decimal, which which weirdly enough already supported like the octal prefix. Derick Rethans 7:59
But that accepts strings, I suppose? George Peter Banyard 8:01
Yes that that accepts strings. Derick Rethans 8:04
And it already supported the 0o prefix? George Peter Banyard 8:07
Yes, which is very on point for PHP I feel. Some things are just supported randomly in one side but not everywhere else. Derick Rethans 8:15
It's a surprise for me that is what I can say. So, yeah, you mentioned as a short RFC, you think there will be any extensions to this in the future? You already mentioned having it maybe de…
Nov 5, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 69: Short Functions
PHP Internals News: Episode 69: Short Functions
London, UK
Thursday, November 5th 2020, 09:32 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with Larry Garfield (Twitter, Website, GitHub) about a new RFC that's he proposing related to Short Functions.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:15
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. Derick Rethans 0:24
Hello, this is Episode 69. Today I'm talking with Larry Garfield, about an RFC that he's just announced called short functions. Hello Larry, would you please introduce yourself? Larry Garfield 0:35
Hello World, I'm Larry Garfield, the director of developer experience at platform.sh. These days, you may know me in the PHP world mainly from my work with PHP FIG. The recent book on functional programming in PHP. And I've gotten more involved in internals in the last several months which is why we're here. Derick Rethans 0:57
I'm pretty sure we'll get back to functional programming in a moment, and your book that you've written about it. But first let's talk about short functions, what are short functions, what is the problem that are trying to solve? Larry Garfield 1:11
Well that starts with the book actually. Oh. Earlier this year, I published a book called Thinking functionally in PHP, on functional programming in PHP, during which I do write a lot of functional code, you know, that kind of goes with the territory. And one of the things I found was that the syntax for short functions, or arrow function, or can be short lambdas, or arrow functions, you know whatever name you want to give them, was really nice for functions where the whole function is just one expression. Which when you're doing functional code is really really common. And it was kind of annoying to have to write the long version with curly braces in PSR 2, PSR 12 format for functions that I wanted to have a name, but we're really just one line anyway does return, blah blah blah. It worked, got the job done. Larry Garfield 2:13
Then hanging around with internals people, friend of the pod Nikita Popov mentioned that it should be really easy. Now that we've got short functions, or short lambdas, do the same thing for named functions. And I thought about. Yeah, that should be doable just in the lexer, which means, even I might be able to pull it off given my paltry miniscule knowledge of PHP internals. So, I took a stab at it and it turned out to be pretty easy. Short functions are just a more compact syntax for writing functions or methods, where the whole thing is just returning an expression. Derick Rethans 2:56
Just a single expression? Larry Garfield 2:58
Yes. If your function is returning two parameters multiplied together, it's a trivial case but you often have functions or methods that are doing. Just one expression and then returning the value. It's a shorter way of writing that. Mirrored on the syntax that short lambdas use. It doesn't enable you to really do anything new, it just lets you write things in a more compact fashion. But the advantage I see is not just less typing. It lets you think about functions in a more expression type way, that this function is simply a map from input to this expression, which is a mindset shift. So yes it's less typing but it's also I can think about my problem as simply an expression translation. And that's very very common in functional programming, also it helps encourage writing pure functions which functional programming is built on, and is just general good practice anyway, pure functions have no side effects. Take no stealth input from globals or anything like that. And their only output is their return value. You want most of your codebase to be that, and a short function is really hard to not make that, you can but it's hard not to. In one sense it's just syntax saving, in another sense it's enabling a more functional mindset, as you're writing code, which I'm very much in favor of. Derick Rethans 4:27
What is it that you're proposing then? Larry Garfield 4:29
The specific syntax is the same function, signatures we have now: function name, open paren, parameters, closed paren, optionally colon return type. But then instead of open curly brace, it's just a double arrow expression semi colon, the exact same body style as a short lambda has. Derick Rethans 4:52
Or as a match expression? Larry Garfield 4:54
Or a match expression or, you know, just array values, you know they're all examples of double arrow expression, which means this thing becomes that thing, wraps that thing. And so it's a very familiar syntax, and it can all go on on one line or you can drop it to the next line and indents depending on how long your code is. I've done both with short lambdas, they both read just fine. That is the exact same semantic meaning as open curly brace return that expression closed curly brace. Derick Rethans 5:28
Yeah, and that wouldn't allow you to allow multiple statements in that case, because the syntax just wouldn't allow for it. Larry Garfield 5:34
Correct. There's just like short lambdas. If you have multiple statements we'll get to that, that's not a thing. There is discussion of having short lambdas now take multiple lines. I haven't weighed in on that yet I'm not getting into that, at this point. Derick Rethans 5:50
Where came up more recently again was with the match expression for PHP 8.0, where, because you're limited to this one expression on the right hand side, there was originally talk of extending that to multiple lines, but then again that wouldn't met, that wouldn't match with the short lambdas that we have, or your short functions if they make it into the language. Larry Garfield 6:11
Right, all of that comes down to the idea of block expressions, which would be a multi lines set of statements that gets interpreted as an expression, which doesn't exist in PHP today, is how something like Rust works, but lifting that into PHP while there might be advantages to it is a big lift, and that needs a lot of thinking through to make it actually makes sense, it may not make sense. Again, I have not dug into that in much detail yet, other than to say, we really need to think that through before doing anything about it. Derick Rethans 6:45
Yeah, especially about what kind of return value you'll end of returning from it because a return without the return keyword is tricky to. It's tricky to create semantic reasoning for and how to do that right. Larry Garfield 6:56
Yeah, there's a lot of semantic trickery involved there so I explicitly avoiding that in this RFC, it's a nice simple surgical change. Derick Rethans 7:05
You mentioned some use cases in the form of, they're useful in functional programming, but most people don't use functional programming with PHP, or maybe in your opinion don't use it yet. Would would be use cases for non functional programming with PHP for this new syntax? Larry Garfield 7:22
Even if you're not doing formal functional programming. There's still a lot of cases where you have a function that just ends up being one line because that's all it needs to be. Especially if you're doing object oriented code. How many classes have you written that have, they're an entity class and they have eight properties, which means you have eight getter methods on them, each of which does nothing except return this arrow, you're removing three lines out of each one of those again using standard syntax conventions. By using a short function for that. You may also have a lot of refactoring techniques encourage producing single line functions or single line methods. For example, if you have an if statement, or a while statement or…
Sep 17, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 68: Observer API
PHP Internals News: Episode 68: Observer API
London, UK
Thursday, September 17th 2020, 09:31 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Levi Morrison (Twitter, GitHub) and Sammy Kaye Powers (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about the new Observer API.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:15
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 68. Today I'm talking with Levi Morrison, and Sammy Powers, about something called the observer API, which is something that is new in PHP eight zero. Now, we've already passed feature freeze, of course, but this snuck in at the last possible moment. What this is observer API going to solve? Levi Morrison 0:44
the observer API is primarily aimed at recording function calls in some way so it can also handle include, and require, and eval, and potentially in the future other things, but this is important because it allows you to write tools that automatically observe, hence the name, when a function begins or ends, or both. Derick Rethans 1:12
What would you use that for? Levi Morrison 1:13
So as an example, Xdebug can use this to know when functions are entered or or left, and other tools such as application performance monitoring, or APM tools like data dog, New Relic, tideways, instana so on, they can use these hooks too. Derick Rethans 1:38
From what I understand that is the point you're coming in from, because we haven't actually done a proper introduction, which I forgot about. I've been out of this for doing this for a while. So both you and Sammy you work for data dog and work on their APM tool, which made you start doing this, I suppose. Sammy Kaye Powers 1:54
Yeah, absolutely. One of the pain points of tying into the engine to to monitor things is that the hooks are insufficient in a number of different ways. The primary way that you would do function call interception is with a little hook called zend_execute_ex and this will hook all userland function calls. The problem is, it has an inherent stack bomb in it where if, depending on your stack size settings you, you're going to blow up your stack. At some point if you have a very very deeply deep call stack in PHP, PHP, technically has a virtually unlimited call stack. But when you use zend_execute_ex, it actually does limit your stack size to whatever your settings are your ulimit set stack size. One of the issues that this solves is that stack overflow issue that you can run into when intercepting userland calls but the other thing that it solves is the potential JIT issues that are coming with PHP eight, where the optimizations that it does could potentially optimize out a call to zend_execute_ex where a profiling or APM tracing kind of extension would not be able to enter set that call, because of the JIT. The Observer API enables to solve multiple issues with this. Not only that, there's more. there's more features to this thing, because zend_execute_ex by default will intercept all userland function calls, and you have no choice but to intercept every single call, whereas, this API is designed to also allow you to choose which function calls specifically you want to intercept, so there is on the very first call of a function call. And it'll basically send in the zend function. This is a little bit of a point we've been kind of going back and forth on what we actually send in on the initialisation. But at the moment it is a zend function so you can kind of look at that and say okay do I want to monitor this function or observe it. If your extension returns a handler and says this is my begin handler This is my end handler. Those handlers will fire at the beginning and end of every function call. So it gives you a little bit of fine grain sort of resolution on what you want to observe. The other really kind of baked in design, part of the design is, we wanted it to play well with neighbours, because some of the hooks, at the moment, well, pretty much all of the hooks. Aside from typical extension hooks. Whenever you tie into the engine it's very easy to be a noisy neighbor. It's very easy not to forward a hook along properly it's very easy to break something for another extension. This has like kind of neighbour considerations baked right in. So when you actually request a begin and end hook. It will manage on its side, how to actually call those, and so you don't have to forward along the hook to other other extensions to make it a little bit more stable in that sense. Derick Rethans 4:52
From working on Xdebug, this is definitely problem forwarding both zend_execute_ex and also zend_execute_internal, which is something I also override are of course. And I think there are similar issues with, with the error display as well and PHP eight will also have a different, or a new API for that as well. Also coming out of a different performance monitoring tool, which is interesting to see that all these things works. You mentioned the Zend function thing and I'm not sure how well versed the audiences and all this internal things what is this zend function thing? Levi Morrison 5:24
as any function in the engine is what represents a function so not the scope that it's called in but the scope that it's defined in. It represents both method calls and function calls. It's triggered whenever a user land function is in play. So it has the function name, the name of the class that it's associated with, it tells you how many parameters you have and things like this. It does not tell you the final object that it's called with, and this is partly why we are debating what exactly should get passed in here, because some people may care. Oh, I only want to observe this with particular inheritors or, or other things of that nature so there's a little bit of fine tuning in the design perhaps still but the basic idea is you'll know the name of the function. What class it's in, and it's bound late enough in the engine that you would also have access to whatever parents that class has, etc. Derick Rethans 6:33
Does it contain the arguments as well, that are being sent, or just a definition of the arguments? Levi Morrison 6:38
The Zend function only contains the definition of the arguments. The hook is split into three sections kind of so there's like initialisation and then begin and end. Initialisation only gives you the Zendo function but to begin and gives you access to what's called the Zend execute data which has more information, including the actual arguments being passed. Derick Rethans 7:03
Okay, so it's the idea of the initialisation, just to find out whether you actually want to intercept the function. And if you want remember that and if not it wouldn't ever bother are the trying to intercept that specific zend function either. Sammy Kaye Powers 7:17
Actually what we actually pass into that initialization function is has been sort of up for debate. The original implementations, that is plural. We've had many different implementations of this thing over the, over the year. Derick you did mention that this got squeezed in last minute it has been a work in progress for a very long time and it actually is fulfilling JIT work so there's a specific mention in the JIT RFC that that mentions an API that is going to be required to intercept some function calls that are optimized out so that's why we were able to sneak in a little bit past feature freeze on the actual merge I think. But what we actually sent into this initialization function is spin up two for debate based on how we've actually implemented it. One of the original early implementations actually called this initialization function during the runtime cache initializat…
Aug 20, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 67: Match Expression
PHP Internals News: Episode 67: Match Expression
London, UK
Thursday, August 20th 2020, 09:30 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Derick Rethans (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about the new Match Expression in PHP 8.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:15
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 67. Today we're going to talk about a match expression. I have asked the author of the match expression RFC, lija Tovilo, whether it wanted to come and speak to me about the match expression, but he declined. As I think it's important that we talk in some depth about all the new features in PHP eight, I decided to interview myself. This is probably going…
Aug 13, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 66: Namespace Token, and Parsing PHP
PHP Internals News: Episode 66: Namespace Token, and Parsing PHP
London, UK
Thursday, August 13th 2020, 09:29 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about his Namespaced Names as a Single Token, and Parsing PHP.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 66. Today I'm talking with Nikita Popov about an RFC that he's made, called namespace names as token. Hello Nikita, how are you this morning? Nikita 0:35
I'm fine Derick, how are you? Derick Rethans 0:38
I'm good as well, it's really warm here two moments and only getting hotter and so. Nikita 0:44
Same here. Sam…
Aug 6, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 65: Null safe operator
PHP Internals News: Episode 65: Null safe operator
London, UK
Thursday, August 6th 2020, 09:28 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Dan Ackroyd (Twitter, GitHub) about the Null Safe Operator RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:18
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 65. Today I'm talking with Dan Ackroyd about an RFC that he's been working on together with Ilija Tovilo. Hello, Dan, would you please introduce yourself? Dan Ackroyd 0:37
Hi Derick, my name is Daniel, I'm the maintainer of the imagick extension, and I occasionally help other people with RFCs. Derick Rethans 0:45
And in this case, you helped out Ilija with the null sa…
Jul 30, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 64: More About Attributes
PHP Internals News: Episode 64: More About Attributes
London, UK
Thursday, July 30th 2020, 09:27 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Benjamin Eberlei (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about a few RFCs related to Attributes.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:17
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 64. Today I'm talking with Benjamin Eberlei, about a bunch of RFCs related to Attributes. Hello Benjamin, how are you this morning? Benjamin Eberlei 0:36
I'm fine. I'm very well actually yeah. The weather's great. Derick Rethans 0:39
I can see that behind you. Of course, if you listen to this podcast, you can't see the bright sun behind Benjamin,…
Jul 23, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 63: Property Write/Set Visibility
PHP Internals News: Episode 63: Property Write/Set Visibility
London, UK
Thursday, July 23rd 2020, 09:26 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with André Rømcke (Twitter, GitHub) about an RFC that he is working on to get asymmetric visibility for properties.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 63. Today I'm talking with André Rømcke, about an RFC that he's proposing titled property write/set visibility. Hello André, would you please introduce yourself? André Rømcke 0:38
Hi Derick, I'm, where to start, that's a wide question but I think I'll focus on the technical side of it. I'm been doing PHP fo…
Jul 16, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 62: Saner Numeric Strings
PHP Internals News: Episode 62: Saner Numeric Strings
London, UK
Thursday, July 16th 2020, 09:25 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with George Peter Banyard (Website, Twitter, GitHub, GitLab) about an RFC that he has proposed to make PHP's numeric string handling less complicated.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:17
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 62. Today I'm talking with George Peter Banyard about an RFC that he's proposing called saner numeric strings. Hello George, how are you this morning? George Peter Banyard 0:36
How are you; I'm doing fine. I'm George Peter Banyard. I work on PHP, and I'm currently employed by The Coding…
Jul 9, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 61: Stable Sorting
PHP Internals News: Episode 61: Stable Sorting
London, UK
Thursday, July 9th 2020, 09:24 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about his Stable Sorting RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:18
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 61. Today I'm talking with Nikita Popov about a rather small RFC that he's proposing called stable sorting. Hello Nikita, how are you this morning? Nikita 0:36
Hey, Derick, I'm great. How are you? Derick Rethans 0:38
Not too bad myself. Let's jump straight in here. The title of the RFC is stable sorting, what does that mean, what is stable sorting, or what is sorting…
Jul 2, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 60: OpenSSL CMS Support
PHP Internals News: Episode 60: OpenSSL CMS Support
London, UK
Thursday, July 2nd 2020, 09:23 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Eliot Lear (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about OpenSSL CMS support, which he has contributed to PHP.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 60. Today I'm talking with Eliot Lear about adding OpenSSL CMS supports to PHP. Hello Eliot, would you please introduce yourself. Eliot Lear 0:34
Hi Derick, it's great to be here. My name is Eliot Lear, I'm a principal engineer for Cisco Systems working on IoT security. Derick Rethans 0:41
I saw somewhere on the internet, Wikipedia I b…
Jun 25, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 59: Named Arguments
PHP Internals News: Episode 59: Named Arguments
London, UK
Thursday, June 25th 2020, 09:22 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about his Named Parameter RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:18
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 59. Today I'm talking with Nikita Popov about a few RFCs that he's produced. Hello Nikita, how are you this morning? Nikita Popov 0:35
Hey Derick, I'm great. How are you? Derick Rethans 0:38
Not too bad, not too bad today. I think I made a decision to stop asking you to introduce yourself because we've done this so many times now. We have quite a few things to go t…
Jun 18, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 58: Non-Capturing Catches
PHP Internals News: Episode 58: Non-Capturing Catches
London, UK
Thursday, June 18th 2020, 09:21 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Max Semenik (GitHub) about the Non-Capturing Catches RFC that he's worked on, and that's been accepted for PHP 8, as well as about bundling, or not, of extensions.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:18
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 58. Today I'm talking with Max Semenik about an RFC that is proposed called non capturing catches. Hello Max, would you please introduce yourself. Max Semenik 0:38
Hi Derick. I'm an open source developer, working mostly on MediaWiki. So that's how I came to be intereste…
Jun 11, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 57: Conditional Codeflow Statements
PHP Internals News: Episode 57: Conditional Codeflow Statements
London, UK
Thursday, June 11th 2020, 09:20 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Ralph Schindler (Twitter, GitHub, Blog) about the Conditional Return, Break, and Continue Statements RFC that he's proposed.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:17
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 57. Today I'm talking with Raluphl Schindler about an RFC that he's proposing titled "Conditional return break and continue statements". Hi Ralph, would you please introduce yourself. Ralph Schindler 0:37
Hey, thanks for having me Derick. I am Ralph Schindler, just to give you a guess the 50,000 fo…
Jun 4, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 56: Mixed Type v2
PHP Internals News: Episode 56: Mixed Type v2
London, UK
Thursday, June 4th 2020, 09:19 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Dan Ackroyd (Twitter, GitHub) about the Mixed Type v2 RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:20
Weekly a podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 56. Today I'm talking with Dan Ackroyd about an RFC that he's made together with Mate Kocsic it's called the mixed type version two. Hello, Dan, would you please introduce yourself? Dan Ackroyd 0:38
Hi Derick. So my name is Dan Ackroyd, also known as Dan Ack online. I maintain the PHP image extension. And I also contribute to PHP internals illegitimate by maintaining some documents that called the RFC codecs that are a set of no…
May 28, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 55: Dealing with Bugs
PHP Internals News: Episode 55: Dealing with Bugs
London, UK
Thursday, May 28th 2020, 09:18 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Ignace Nyamagana Butera (Twitter, GitHub, Blog) about how the PHP project handles bugs and bug reports.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 55. Today I'm talking with Ignace Nyamagana Butera after he'd asked me on Twitter, how PHP deals with bugs. A few episodes ago, I did a Q&A session about the RFC process. And this time again, we'll have Ignace Nyamagana Butera asking the questions. Would you please introduce yourself? Ignace Nyamagana Butera 0:46
Hello, everyone. Hel…
May 21, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 54: Magic Method Signatures
PHP Internals News: Episode 54: Magic Method Signatures
London, UK
Thursday, May 21st 2020, 09:17 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Gabriel Caruso (Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn) about the "Ensure correct signatures of magic methods" RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 54. Today I'm talking with Gabriel Caruso about his ensure correct signatures of magic methods RFC. Hello Gabriel, would you please introduce yourself? Gabriel Caruso 0:37
Hello Derick and hello to everyone as well. My name is Gabriel. I'm from Brazil, but I'm currently in the Netherlands. I'm working in a company called Usabila…
May 14, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 53: Constructor Property Promotion
PHP Internals News: Episode 53: Constructor Property Promotion
London, UK
Thursday, May 14th 2020, 09:16 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about the Constructor Property Promotion RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 53. Today I'm talking with Nikita Popov about a few RFCs that he's made in the last few weeks. Let's start with the constructor property promotion RFC. Nikita Popov 0:36
Hello Nikita, would you please introduce yourself? Hi, Derick. I am Nikita and I am doing PHP internals work at JetBrains and the constructor promotion, constructor prope…
May 7, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 52: Floats and Locales
PHP Internals News: Episode 52: Floats and Locales
London, UK
Thursday, May 7th 2020, 09:15 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with George Banyard (Website, Twitter, GitHub, GitLab) about an RFC that he has proposed together with Máté Kocsis (Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn) to make PHP's float to string logic no longer use locales.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 52. Today I'm talking with George Banyard about an RFC that he's made together with Mate Kocsis. This RFC is titled locale independent floats to string. Hello, George, would you please introduce yourself? George Banyard 0:39
Hello, I'm Geor…
Apr 30, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 51: Object Ergonomics
PHP Internals News: Episode 51: Object Ergonomics
London, UK
Thursday, April 30th 2020, 09:14 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with Larry Garfield (Twitter, Website, GitHub) about a blog post that he was written related to PHP's Object Ergonomics.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 51. Today I'm talking with Larry Garfield, not about an RFC for once, but about a blog post that he's written called Object Ergonomics. Larry, would you please introduce yourself? Larry Garfield 0:38
Hello World. My name is Larry Garfield, also Crell, CRELL, on various social medias. I work at platform.sh in developer r…
Apr 23, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 50: The RFC Process
PHP Internals News: Episode 50: The RFC Process
London, UK
Thursday, April 23rd 2020, 09:13 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News", Henrik Gemal (LinkedIn, Website) asks me about how PHP's RFC process works, and I try to answer all of his questions.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 50. Today I'm talking with Henrik come out after he reached out with a question. You might know that at the end of every podcast, I ask: if you have any questions, feel free to email me. And Henrik was the first person to actually do so within a year and a half's time. For the fun, I'm thinking that instead of I'm asking the questio…
Apr 16, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 49: COPA
PHP Internals News: Episode 49: COPA
London, UK
Thursday, April 16th 2020, 09:12 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I converse with Jakob Givoni (LinkedIn) about the "Compact Object Property Assignment", or COPA for short, RFC that he is proposing for inclusion in PHP 8.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 49. Today I'm talking with Jakob Givoni about an RFC that is made with a very long name, the compact object property assignment RFC or COPA for short. Jakob, would you please introduce yourself? Jakob Givoni 0:39
Yes, my name is Jakob. I'm from Denmark, and I've been working programming in PHP for 20 year…
Apr 9, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 48: PHP 8, JIT, and complexity
PHP Internals News: Episode 48: PHP 8, JIT, and complexity
London, UK
Thursday, April 9th 2020, 09:11 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I discuss PHP 8's JIT engine with Sara Golemon (GitHub).
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 48. Today I'm talking with Sara Golemon about PHP 8 and JIT. Sara, would you please introduce yourself? Sara Golemon 0:33
Hi there. Hi there, everybody listening to PHP internals podcast. I'm Sara. I've been on this podcast before. But in case you're just getting here to for the first time, welcome to the podcast. You have a nice backlog to go through. I am a lapsed web developer,…
Apr 2, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 47: Attributes v2
PHP Internals News: Episode 47: Attributes v2
London, UK
Thursday, April 2nd 2020, 09:10 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Benjamin Eberlei (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about an RFC that he wrote, that would add Attributes to PHP.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 47. Today I'm talking with Benjamin Eberlei about the attributes version 2 RFC. Hello, Benjamin, would you please introduce yourself? Benjamin Eberlei 0:34
Hello, I'm Benjamin. I started contributing to PHP in more detail last year with my RFC on the extension to DOM. And I felt that the attributes thing was the next great or bigger t…
Mar 26, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 46: str_contains()
PHP Internals News: Episode 46: str_contains()
London, UK
Thursday, March 26th 2020, 09:09 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Philipp Tanlak (GitHub, Xing) about his str_contains() RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 46. Today I'm talking with Phillipp Tanlak, about an RFC that he's made titled str_contains. Phillipp, would you please introduce yourself. Philipp Tanlak 0:35
Hey, Derick. My name is Philipp. I'm 25 years old and I live in Germany. I work for an IT service company, which does mainly development and maintenance of IT projects. We specialise in the maintenance of e-commerce webs…
Mar 19, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 45: Language Evolution Overview Proposal
PHP Internals News: Episode 45: Language Evolution Overview Proposal
London, UK
Thursday, March 19th 2020, 09:08 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about the Language Evolution Overview Proposal RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 45. Today I'm talking with Nikita Popov yet again about a non technical RFC that he's produced titled language evolution overview. Somewhere last year, there was a big discussion about P++, an alternative ID of how to deal with improving PHP as a language but also still think about how some other people already use PHP and I d…
Mar 12, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 44: Write Once Properties
PHP Internals News: Episode 44: Write Once Properties
London, UK
Thursday, March 12th 2020, 09:07 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Máté Kocsis (Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn) about the Write Once Properties RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 44. Today I'm talking with Máté Kocsis about an RFC that he produced called write only properties. Hello, Máté. How's it going? Máté Kocsis 0:34
Yeah, fine. Thanks. Derick Rethans 0:36
Would you mind introducing yourself a moment? Máté Kocsis 0:38
My name is Máté Kocsis and I'm a software engineer at LogMeIn. I've been using PHP for 15 ye…
Mar 5, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 43: Syntax Tweaks
PHP Internals News: Episode 43: Syntax Tweaks
London, UK
Thursday, March 5th 2020, 09:06 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about the RFCs. One on abstract methods in traits, and one about an improvement to the tokenizer.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 43. Today I'm talking with Nikita Popov yet again about a few RFCs that he's produced for PHP 8. Good morning, Nikita. How are you doing? Nikita 0:34
Good morning, Derick. I'm doing great. Derick Rethans 0:37
I've given up on introducing you because we've done this so many times. Now, you don't need a…
Feb 27, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 42: Userspace Operator Overloading
PHP Internals News: Episode 42: Userspace Operator Overloading
London, UK
Thursday, February 27th 2020, 09:05 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Jan Böhmer (GitHub, LinkedIn) about the Userspace Operator Overloading RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 42. Today I'm talking with Jan Böhmer about Userspace Operator Overloading. Jan, would you please introduce yourself? Jan Böhmer 0:33
Hi, my name is Jan Böhmer. I'm a physics student from Germany. And I'm the author of the Operator Overloading RFC. Derick Rethans 0:40
What brought you to writing this RFC? Jan Böhmer 0:42
Mostly becaus…
Feb 20, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 41: __toArray()
PHP Internals News: Episode 41: __toArray()
London, UK
Thursday, February 20th 2020, 09:04 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Steven Wade (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about the __toArray() RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. Hi, this is Episode 41. Today I'm talking with Stephen Wade about an RFC that he's produced, called __toArray(). Hi, Steven, would you please introduce yourself? Steven Wade 0:35
Hi, my name is Steven Wade. I'm a software engineer for a company called follow up boss. I've been using PHP since 2007. And I love the language. So I wanted to be able to give back to it with this RFC. Derick…
Feb 13, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 40: Syntax Tweaks
PHP Internals News: Episode 40: Syntax Tweaks
London, UK
Thursday, February 13th 2020, 09:03 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about a bunch of smaller RFCs.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 40. Again, I'm talking with Nikita. Perhaps we should rename this podcast to the Derick and Nikita Show at some point in the future. This time we're going to talk about a bunch of smaller RFC that he produced related to tweaking PHP syntax for PHP 8. Nikita, would you please introduce yourself? Nikita Popov 0:42
Hi, I'm Nikita and I do PHP core developement on beha…
Feb 6, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 39: Stringable Interface
PHP Internals News: Episode 39: Stringable Interface
London, UK
Thursday, February 6th 2020, 09:02 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nicolas Grekas (Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Symfony Connect) about the new "Stringable Interface" that Nicolas is proposing, as well as about voting rights (on RFCs).
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. Hello, this is Episode 39. Today I'm talking with Nicholas Grekas about an RFC that he's produced called stringable interface. I already spoke with Nicholas last year about the work that Symfony does the new PHP versions come out to look at deprecations and to make sure that versions…
Jan 30, 2020
PHP Internals News: Episode 38: Preloading and WeakMaps
PHP Internals News: Episode 38: Preloading and WeakMaps
London, UK
Thursday, January 30th 2020, 09:01 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about PHP 7.4 preloading mishaps, and his WeakMaps RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
RFC: WeakMaps
Transcript
Derick Rethans 0:16
Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weeklish podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 38. I'm talking with Nikita Popov about a few things that have happened over the holidays. Nikita, How were your holidays? Nikita Popov 0:34
My holidays days were great. Derick Rethans 0:36
I thought I'd start with something else then I did last year. In any case, and wanting to talk to you this…
Nov 28, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 37: PHP 7.4 Celebrations!
PHP Internals News: Episode 37: PHP 7.4 Celebrations!
London, UK
Thursday, November 28th 2019, 09:37 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" we are celebrating the new features that are part of this release. Instead of talking with a single guest about an RFC or feature, instead, I have asked followers of the @PHPIntNews Twitter account to record a snippet to talk about their own favourite PHP 7.4 features.
With thanks to Benjamin Eberlei, George Banyard, James Titcumb, Mark Randall, Matthew Setter, Nikita Popov, Vincent Dechenaux, and William Pinaud.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
RFC: Typed Properties
*
RFC: Foreign Function Interface
*
Episode 2: PHP Compiler and FFI
*
RFC: Preloading
*
RFC: Allow throwing exceptions from __toString()
*
Episode 14:…
Nov 21, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 36: What didn’t make it into PHP 7.4?
PHP Internals News: Episode 36: What didn’t make it into PHP 7.4?
London, UK
Thursday, November 21st 2019, 09:36 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" we're looking back at all the RFCs that we discussed on this podcast for PHP 7.4, but did not end up making the cut. In their own words, the RFC authors explain what these features are, with your host interjecting his own comments on the state of affairs.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
Episode 1: Saner string to number comparisons
*
Episode 5: Comprehensions
*
Episodes 8 and 23: Deprecating Short Open Tags
*
Episode 10: LSP and Operator Precedence
*
Episode 15: base_convert() Improvements
*
Episode 18: Strict Operator Directive
*
Episode 21: str_starts_with() and friends
Credits
Music: Chipper…
Nov 7, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 35: Cryptography
PHP Internals News: Episode 35: Cryptography
London, UK
Thursday, November 7th 2019, 09:35 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Scott Arciszewski (Website, Twitter, GitHub, Patreon) about the recent PHP-FPM vulnerability and the state of cryptography in PHP.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
PHP-FPM bug
*
PHP Bug Report
*
CVE 2019-11043
*
Exploit Code
*
ECB Penguin
*
Padding Oracle Attack
*
Constant Time Encoding with ext/sodium: sodium_base642bin()
*
Ciphersweet
*
Supersingular isogeny key exchange
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Oct 31, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 34: Deprecate Backtick Operator
PHP Internals News: Episode 34: Deprecate Backtick Operator
London, UK
Thursday, October 31st 2019, 09:34 GMT
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Mark Randall (GitHub) about an RFC that he proposed that would deprecate the backtick operator.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
RFC: Deprecate Backtick Operator
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Oct 24, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 33: Union Types
PHP Internals News: Episode 33: Union Types
London, UK
Thursday, October 24th 2019, 09:33 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about an RFC that he created to add union types to PHP.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
RFC: Union Types
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Oct 17, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 32: Writing Extensions
PHP Internals News: Episode 32: Writing Extensions
London, UK
Thursday, October 17th 2019, 09:32 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with James Titcumb (Twitter, GitHub, Website, LinkedIn) about writing PHP extensions commercially.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
PHP Internals Book
*
PHP at the Core: A Hacker's Guide
*
PECL Development List archive
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Oct 10, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 31: DOM Living Standard API
PHP Internals News: Episode 31: DOM Living Standard API
London, UK
Thursday, October 10th 2019, 09:31 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Benjamin Eberlei (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about an RFC that he produced that would implement the new "DOM Living Standard API".
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
RFC: DOM Living Standard API
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Oct 3, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 30: Object Initializer
PHP Internals News: Episode 30: Object Initializer
London, UK
Thursday, October 3rd 2019, 09:30 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Michał Brzuchalski (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about an RFC that he produced that would add a new "Object Initializer" syntax.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
RFC: Object Initializer
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Sep 26, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 29: Reclassifying Engine Warnings
PHP Internals News: Episode 29: Reclassifying Engine Warnings
London, UK
Thursday, September 26th 2019, 09:29 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub) about adding information about arguments and return types to PHP's reflection mechanism.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
RFC: Reclassifying engine warnings
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Sep 19, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 28: Moving PHP Documentation to GIT
PHP Internals News: Episode 28: Moving PHP Documentation to GIT
London, UK
Thursday, September 19th 2019, 09:28 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Andreas Heigl (Twitter, GitHub, Mastodon, Website) about his endeavours of moving the PHP Documentation project from SVN to GIT.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
Documentation Transition Project
*
The project's Gitter chat
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Sep 12, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 27: Argument Information
PHP Internals News: Episode 27: Argument Information
London, UK
Thursday, September 12th 2019, 09:27 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub) about adding information about arguments and return types to PHP's reflection mechanism.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
Nikita's call to arms
*
PHP Parser
*
AST extension
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Sep 5, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 26: Making Symfony ready for PHP 7.4
PHP Internals News: Episode 26: Making Symfony ready for PHP 7.4
London, UK
Thursday, September 5th 2019, 09:26 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nicolas Grekas (Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Symfony Connect) about how the Symfony project approaches the task of making it ready for PHP 7.4, and some bumps they ran into along the road.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
Symfony
*
Outstanding PHP 7.4 Symfony Issue
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Aug 29, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 25: Security Management
PHP Internals News: Episode 25: Security Management
London, UK
Thursday, August 29th 2019, 09:25 BST
This episode of "PHP Internals News" is the second and last part of a longer conversation that I had with Stanislav Malyshev (GitHub, LinkedIn) about security related aspects of PHP development. In this episode, we discuss how the PHP projects deals with security issues.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
Mitre
*
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE): https://cve.mitre.org/
*
PHP's security pages.
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Aug 22, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 24: Fuzzing
PHP Internals News: Episode 24: Fuzzing
London, UK
Thursday, August 22nd 2019, 09:24 BST
This episode of "PHP Internals News" is the first part of a longer conversation that I had with Stanislav Malyshev (GitHub, LinkedIn) about security related aspects of PHP development. In this episode, we discuss a fuzzer to test input safety of data coming into PHP.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
American Fuzzy Lop (AFL): Wikipedia, Website, and GitHub repository.
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Aug 15, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 23: Deprecated Short Open Tags, again
PHP Internals News: Episode 23: Deprecated Short Open Tags, again
London, UK
Thursday, August 15th 2019, 09:23 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with George Banyard (Website, Twitter, GitHub, GitLab) about his second RFC "Deprecate Short Open Tags, again".
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
RFC: Deprecate PHP Short open tags
*
RFC: Deprecate short open tags, again
*
PHP-CS-Fixer
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Aug 8, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 22: PostGreSQL Escape Character
PHP Internals News: Episode 22: PostGreSQL Escape Character
London, UK
Thursday, August 8th 2019, 09:22 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Matteo Beccati (LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub) about his "Escape PDO "?" parameter placeholder" RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
RFC: Escape PDO "?" parameter placeholder
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Aug 1, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 21: str_starts_with() and friends
PHP Internals News: Episode 21: str_starts_with() and friends
London, UK
Thursday, August 1st 2019, 09:21 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Will Hudgins (LinkedIn, Website, GitHub) about his "Add str_starts_with(), str_ends_with() and related functions" RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
RFC: Add str_starts_with(), str_ends_with() and related functions
*
The intl extension's functions operating on graphemes
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Jul 25, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 20: Test Infrastructure Improvements
PHP Internals News: Episode 20: Test Infrastructure Improvements
London, UK
Thursday, July 25th 2019, 09:20 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub) about improvements he and others have made to test PHP on many more platforms and in many more configurations.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
Valgrind
*
GCC sanitisers
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Jul 18, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 19: Deprecate curly brace syntax
PHP Internals News: Episode 19: Deprecate curly brace syntax
London, UK
Thursday, July 18th 2019, 09:19 BST
In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Theodore Brown (Twitter, Website, GitHub) about the "Deprecate curly brace syntax for accessing array elements and string offsets" RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
RFC: Deprecate curly brace syntax for accessing array elements and string offsets
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Jul 11, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 18: Strict Operator Directive
PHP Internals News: Episode 18: Strict Operator Directive
London, UK
Thursday, July 11th 2019, 09:18 BST
In this seventeenth episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with Arnold Daniels (Twitter, Website, GitHub) about his Strict Operator Directive RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
*
RFC: Strict Operator Directive
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Jul 4, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 17: Numeric Literal Separator
PHP Internals News: Episode 17: Numeric Literal Separator
London, UK
Thursday, July 4th 2019, 09:17 BST
In this seventeenth episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with Theodore Brown (Twitter, Website, GitHub) and Bishop Bettini (Twitter, Website, GitHub) about their Numeric Literal Separator RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
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RFC: Numeric Literal Separator.
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Jun 27, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 16: API, ABI, and ext/recode
PHP Internals News: Episode 16: API, ABI, and ext/recode
London, UK
Thursday, June 27th 2019, 09:16 BST
In this sixteenth episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with Joe Watkins (Twitter, Patreon, Website, GitHub) about his APIs, ABIs, and an RFC to unbundle the ext/recode extension.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
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RFC: Unbundle ext/recode
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Article "Adverse ABIs" discussing the ABI problems with the MacOS machine.
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Jun 20, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 15: base_convert() Improvements
PHP Internals News: Episode 15: base_convert() Improvements
London, UK
Thursday, June 20th 2019, 09:15 BST
In this fifteenth episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with Scott Dutton (Twitter, GitHub) about his base_convert() Improvements RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://phpinternals.news/feed.rss, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
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RFC: base_convert() Improvements
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Jun 13, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 14: __toString() Exceptions
PHP Internals News: Episode 14: __toString() Exceptions
London, UK
Thursday, June 13th 2019, 09:14 BST
In this fourteenth episode of "PHP Internals News" we talk to Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub) about a late __toString Exception RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://phpinternals.news/feed.rss, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
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RFC: Allow throwing exceptions from __toString()
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Jun 6, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 13: Release Management
PHP Internals News: Episode 13: Release Management
London, UK
Thursday, June 6th 2019, 09:13 BST
In this thirteenth episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with Sara Golemon (Twitter, GitHub) about PHP's Release Management.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
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Relase Process
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Release Managers
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PHP 7.4 Release Schedule
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
May 30, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 12: Argon Hash Implementation
PHP Internals News: Episode 12: Argon Hash Implementation
London, UK
Thursday, May 30th 2019, 09:12 BST
In this twelfth episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with Sara Golemon (Twitter, GitHub) about the "Provide argon2i(d) implementations for password_hash() from ext/sodium" RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
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RFC: Password Hashing Registry
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RFC: Provide argon2i(d) implementations for password_hash() from ext/sodium
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Sodium Extension
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Sodium Extension Documentation
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Argon2 Algorithm
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
May 23, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 11: Parallel Extension
PHP Internals News: Episode 11: Parallel Extension
London, UK
Thursday, May 23rd 2019, 09:11 BST
In this eleventh episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk with Joe Watkins (Twitter, Patreon, Website, GitHub) about his parallel extension.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
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pecl/parallel: https://pecl.php.net/parallel
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CSP: Communication Sequential Processes
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
May 16, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 10: LSP and Operator Precedence
PHP Internals News: Episode 10: LSP and Operator Precedence
London, UK
Thursday, May 16th 2019, 09:10 BST
In this tenth episode of "PHP Internals News" we talk to Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub) about a few RFCs that are related to LSP and operator precedence.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://phpinternals.news/feed.rss, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
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RFC: Always generate fatal error for incompatible method signatures Associativity
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RFC: Deprecate left-associative ternary operator
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RFC: Change the precedence of the concatenation operator
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
May 9, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 9: Bundled Extensions
PHP Internals News: Episode 9: Bundled Extensions
London, UK
Thursday, May 9th 2019, 09:09 BST
In this ninth episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk to Kalle Nielsen (Twitter, GitHub) about bundled extensions, and his work on the Windows port of PHP.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://phpinternals.news/feed.rss, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
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RFC: Unbundle ext/interbase
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Supermetrics
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
May 2, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 8: Deprecating Short Open Tags
PHP Internals News: Episode 8: Deprecating Short Open Tags
London, UK
Thursday, May 2nd 2019, 09:08 BST
In this eight episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk to George Banyard (Twitter, GitHub) about deprecating PHP's short open tags (), and getting into PHP internals development.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://phpinternals.news/feed.rss, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes.
There is now also a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Show Notes
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RFC: Deprecate PHP Short open tags
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RFC: Remove Alternative PHP Tags
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PHP-CS-Fixer (full_opening_tag).
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Apr 25, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 7: PHP and JIT
PHP Internals News: Episode 7: PHP and JIT
London, UK
Thursday, April 25th 2019, 09:07 BST
In this seventh episode of "PHP Internals News" I talk to Zeev Suraski (Twitter, Website, GitHub) about the new JIT engine for PHP 8, as well as earlier efforts to get a JIT engine into PHP.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. Show Notes
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RFC: PHP's JIT
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PHP NG: information, and RFC.
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Apr 18, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 6: PHP Quality Assurance
PHP Internals News: Episode 6: PHP Quality Assurance
London, UK
Thursday, April 18th 2019, 09:06 BST
In this sixth episode of "PHP Internals News" we talk to Remi Collet (Twitter, Website, GitHub, Donate) about the work that he does through RedHat and Fedora to improve the quality of PHP, PHP extensions, and PHP libraries and frameworks.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. Show Notes
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Fedora
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RedHat
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Remi's RPMs: https://rpms.remirepo.net/
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Apr 11, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 5: Comprehensions
PHP Internals News: Episode 5: Comprehensions
London, UK
Thursday, April 11th 2019, 09:05 BST
In this fifth episode of "PHP Internals News" we talk to Larry Garfield (Twitter, Website, GitHub) about his Comprehensions RFC, and briefly about Palm OS development.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. Show Notes
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platform.sh
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RFC: Comprehensions
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Apr 4, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 4: Short Arrow Functions
PHP Internals News: Episode 4: Short Arrow Functions
London, UK
Thursday, April 4th 2019, 09:04 BST
In this fourth episode of "PHP Internals News" we talk to Nikita Popov again (Twitter, GitHub) about his Arrow Functions 2.0 RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. Show Notes
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RFC: Arrow Functions 2.0.
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Mar 28, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 3: Abolish Narrow Margins and Weak References
PHP Internals News: Episode 3: Abolish Narrow Margins and Weak References
London, UK
Thursday, March 28th 2019, 09:03 GMT
In this third episode of "PHP Internals News" we talk to Joe Watkins (Twitter, Patreon, Website, GitHub) about his Abolish Narrow Margins and Weak References RFCs, and we also talk a little bit more the FFI RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. Show Notes
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RFC: Abolish Narrow Margins
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RFC: Weak References
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RFC: FFI
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Mar 21, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 2: PHP Compiler and FFI
PHP Internals News: Episode 2: PHP Compiler and FFI
London, UK
Thursday, March 21st 2019, 09:02 GMT
In this second episode of "PHP Internals News" we talk to Anthony Ferrara (@ircmaxell) about his PHP Compiler project, and the new FFI functionality that has made it into PHP 7.4.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. Show Notes
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Anthony's PHP Compiler project, with supporting libraries:
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https://github.com/ircmaxell/libgccffi
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https://github.com/ircmaxell/ffime
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RFC: FFI
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RFC: Locked Classes
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RFC: Deprecate alternate access to array elements and chars in string
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Mar 8, 2019
PHP Internals News: Episode 1: Saner string to number comparisons
PHP Internals News: Episode 1: Saner string to number comparisons
London, UK
Friday, March 8th 2019, 13:21 GMT
Welcome to the first episode of "PHP Internals News", a weekly-ish podcast about what goes on in the land of PHP development. In this podcast, we discuss current RFCs that are up for discussion, implementations of features with technical detail, and explanations of odd bugs, and their fixes.
In this first episode we talk to Nikita Popov about his Saner string to number comparisons RFC.
The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify. Show Notes
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RFC Watch — a web site to keep an eye on RFC voting progress
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RFC: Permit trailing whitespace in numeric strings
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RFC: JIT
Credits
Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0