On the php.internals mailing list Zeev Suraski, one of the developers behind the Zend Engine powering the PHP language, posted some thoughts about PHP 8, the next major jump for the language.

As I mentioned a few days ago I intended to send it slightly later - but as Nikita brought up the topic of PHP 8, this is probably as good a time as any to start the discussion.

The goal of this email isn't to discuss in detail each and every topic that's mentioned, but rather to establish whether we want to move to focus on PHP 8 as we go beyond PHP 7.3, based on some of the research projects and PoCs we've been working on.

He then lists out some of the places he thinks should be included in the next major version of PHP including:

• Just-in-time compilation
• Better support [for] long-running, async-based, microservices-focused execution model
• Preloading support.

He notes that the list he presented is by no means complete and not a decree of what should come but suggestions of where he sees the language could dramatically improve. The post has already gathered a large number of replies from people all over in the PHP community sharing their own ideas and responding to the ones Zeev presented in his original message.

Freek Van der Herten has a new post to his site sharing a resource you can use to more easily keep up with PHP internals and RFCs - the externals.io service.

When features get added to PHP there’s a lot of discussion first about the new functionality. This is done on the so-called internals mailing list. You can try to follow the discussions via a rather ugly interface at http://news.php.net. The site looks like a very old school web email client where all conversations are just running through each other.

A couple of days ago Matthieu Napoli launched his new site externals.io. This site makes following internals a lot easier.

The externals.io site provides a clean interface to the discussions happening on the php.internals list, including nested threads and the ability to track unread messages. It definitely makes it simpler to keep track of the line of emails in a thread, but it's definitely read-only with no intent on being a full on mailing list replacement.

The Three Devs and a Maybe podcast has a new episode posted today with special guest Joe Watkins, PHP internals developer and developer on the APCu extension. They catch up with Joe and what's been happening in the world of PHP internals lately (and the flurry of excitement around PHP 7).

On this weeks show we are lucky to be joined by recurring guest and friend of the show Joe Watkins. We start of discussion with the upcoming PHP 7 release, reasoning behind why it has been postponed, the bright future of adoption to the release compared to previous versions and how the release gets packaged up for different distributions.

Other topics mentioned in this latest episode include:

• "uopz" (User Operations for Zend)
• the pthreads polyfill
• the recent APCu events and additions

The show notes also link to several of Joe's projects on GitHub for reference. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3. Also be sure to subscribe to their feed if you enjoy the episode and want to hear more.

Pascal Martin has posted his latest summary of the discussions happening on the php.internals mailing list for the month of October 2014.

809 messages have been exchanged in October 2014 on PHP’s internals@ mailing-list — a bit more than in September. [...] First of all, PHP 5.6 has entered its normal cycle of releases, with a first maintenance version at the beginning of the month.

He includes a graph of the (monthly) number of emails over the last year and how October fits in. Topics mentioned include:

• an RFC to remove deprecated functionality in PHP7
• the RFC for the PHP7 release timeline
• Flagging functions as deprecated in favor of variadic functions
• Getting the XML output of a phpdbg tool closer to the DBGp protocol
• an RFC for big integer support
• an proposal for allowing objects as hash keys

If you'd like to follow along with the discussions or are interested in getting an "inside look" at what's going on with the language, you can use either the web-based reader or subscribe to the mailing list.

Pascal Martin has posted his latest summary of topics and conversations from August on the php.internals mailing list.

I’ve been quite busy in August (and I’ve taken some holidays, during which I pretty much had no Internet access, which doesn’t help), and I haven’t been able to write my digest of internals@ for July 2014 in due time. Instead of writing it now and keeping getting late for August’s one, I’ve chosen to skip my digest of July - and to write August’s one, which you can read below.

He summarizes the around 700 messages on the list in August, including a graph showing them broken out over the days of the month. Topics up for discussion in August included:

• the first Release Candidate of PHP 5.3.29 and the PHP 5.3.29 final release (EOL for 5.3)
• release plans (bugfixes) for PHP 5.4
• the release of PHP 5.6 was getting close
• a thread wondering if they should do one last 5.x version before the release of PHP 7
• the conversation around the RFC for moving the phpng branch into master,

Check out the full post for the details on each of these and more of the happenings on the internals list during August.

Pascal Martin has posted a summary of the PHP internals mailing list discussions for the month of June.

June 2014 came back down to a reasonable 493 messages on PHP’s internals@ mailing-list, after a month of May with more than 800 mails, including some long discussions about phpng.

He goes over several other topics discussed last month including:

• the upcoming PHP 5.6 release
• the end of life on PHP 5.3
• a discussion around "pickle" (an alternative extension installer)
• the "bare name array" RFC
• the serialization break (that was later rectified)

...and many more. Check out the full summary for more discussions and links to several of the topics and resources involved.

Related to a recent discussion on the php.internals mailing list, Chris Jones has posted about moving away from the MySQL extension in favor of the MySQLi functionality and the effort bubbling up to make the old functionality deprecated.

An important discussion on the PHP "internals" development mailing list is taking place. It's one that you should take some note of. It concerns the next step in transitioning PHP applications away from the very old mysql extension and towards adopting the much better mysqli extension or PDO_MYSQL driver for PDO. This would allow the mysql extension to, at some as-yet undetermined time in the future, be removed.

He links to a RFC that's been posted to help promote and push this idea forward with mentions of the "carrot" and "stick" methods for pushing users towards mysqli.

As always, there is a lot of guesswork going on as to what MySQL APIs are in current use by PHP applications, how those applications are deployed, and what their upgrade cycle is. [...] I want to repeat that no time frame for the eventual removal of the mysql extension is set. I expect it to be some years away.

There's been a lot of chatter about a recent RFC from Pádraic Brady on the php.internals maling list - his proposal to add native escaping to the PHP core. He shares some of his own thoughts about the proposal in a new post to his site.

A short time ago today, I submitted a PHP RFC for discussion which proposes adding an SPL Escaper class and, quite possibly, a related set of functions dedicated to escaping data for output to HTML/XML to PHP: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/escaper. The RFC itself should be a good read if you want to understand why I’m proposing this but the basics are quite simple. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is one of the two most common security vulnerabilities in web applications – the other being SQL Injection. Despite this, PHP’s offering of escaping functions is extremely limited.

He talks about what problems the proposed solution solves and how it could help protect PHP programmers more effectively than the more complicated methods they have to go through now. If you're interested in reading the conversations so far, you can start here and walk through the messages.

Freek Lijten has a recent post looking at some of the types of discussions that happen on the php-internals mailing list.

The internals list is the place to be to hear about the current state of PHP. It is one of PHP's many mailing lists, but this is the one where (core) developers discuss new features, current bugs and wild ideas. If you want to keep up with things it is a good idea to sign up, it is not an extremely high volume list and if you ignore the noise it is quite informative. In this article I would like to share examples of stuff typically discussed on the list.

He mentions feature requests in general and, more specifically things like traits support (multiple inheritance), array dereferencing, callable arrays and the debate over the short array syntax.

There's been lots of talk about type hinting lately (both on blogs and on mailing lists) so Mike Willbanks has decided to add some of his own thoughts about why it should be included.

You may be wondering why you would want type hinting in a dynamic language. This can come in very handy especially if you are looking to enforce a specific type or need to ensure that you are indeed working with say an integer. Since this is written in C, it will be far faster than actually type casting it yourself or enforcing it yourself. General speed improvements are always nice to have.

He includes two code examples of it in use and points to the php.internals mailing list for the vote count either way. So far (as of the time of those post) the results seem mixed with some recommending it outright while others suggest waiting until the spec is completely done before integration (PHP6?).