The Three Devs & A Maybe podcast has released their latest episode today - Episode #40, News on PHP 7, and how PHP internally works with special guest Joe Watkins. In it the guys talk about the upcoming (major) version of PHP and some of the work Joe's been doing related to Unicode and other parts of the language.

In this weeks show we are very lucky to have Joe Watkins on again to discuss all things PHP 7. Starting off with the decisions behind calling the next release 7, we delve into the reasons for 6 being abandoned. Moving on from this we look into what PHP 7 currently has scheduled to offer, including the PHPNG patch, an AST and maybe Joe's own Unicode String class. We then discuss how a PHP script is internally lexed, parsed/compiled and cached, - including how a JIT would speed up certain use-cases. Finally we touch upon the much requested String type hinting and how a solution similar to Java's could be implemented with minimal hassle.

Other topics mentioned in this episode include: the last PHP 5.3 release ever, PHPNG and upgrading extensions from PHP5 to PHPNG. You can listen to this latest episode either through the downloading the mp3. If you enjoy the episode, consider http://threedevsandamaybe.com/podcast.xml">subscribing to their feed and get the latest shows as they're released.