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On the Sticher.io blog Brendt has written up a guide looking forward to PHP's next major release and what's planned to be included in PHP 7.4.
PHP 7.4 will probably be released somewhere December 2019. tagged: language php74 features lookahead rfc planned
Link: https://stitcher.io/blog/new-in-php-74
If you're looking for a good summary of what's coming up in the next major version of PHP (v7.3), look no further than this new post from the Cloudways blog.
PHP is surely giving a tough competition to other scripting languages, thanks to the developers for the rapid updates they unleash from time to time. [...] In the series of these updates, PHP recently has got another milestone with the release of RC1 of PHP 7.3. The version also got some new much-needed updates. While the official release date of PHP 7.3 is given of late December 2018.In this blog, I will discuss newly introduced PHP 7.3 features and updates.
The post then goes through several of the improvements and new features, providing code examples and descriptions for:
...just to name a few. There are several others included in the post as well. While PHP 7.3 hasn't been released as a final version yet, you can test these changes out via the current release candidate in your development: PHP 7.3.0RC2. Additionally, more information about the RFCs - including those that weren't accepted - can be found on the PHP wiki.
On his Medium.com site Nicolas Grekas talks about a new RFC that's been proposed to provide a safer method for serializing and unserializing values in native PHP functionality.
PHP serialization/unserialization has several drawbacks. [...] To mitigate these security issues, the unserialize() function handles an allowed_classes option since PHP 7.0. Implementing Serializable has this security-mitigation advantage of allowing authors to filter the allowed classes in the subgraph managed by their objects. This feature is only a mitigation because not all use cases know all the possible classes beforehand.
He starts by listing out some of the issues with both the current implementations of serialization and unserialization in PHP. From there he makes a proposal for some new functionality to help make things a bit more sane:
@phpdeveloper.org
__serialize magic methodS type representing serialized data__unserialize magic methodHe finishes up the post talking about some of the expected benefits of this kind of functionality and a few of the extra considerations that would need to be thought through as a part of the implementation.
In a new post to his site Sammy Kaye Powers shows you how to test unreleased features of PHP using a pull request related to a RFC that's officially been proposed.
We'll be discovering and testing a completely unreleased feature of php-src from an RFC that's still under discussion.If you've ever wanted to be ahead of the curve of PHP features or you've just wanted to contribute back to PHP internals, testing an unreleased feature from an RFC is a fun and educational way to do so.
He uses the typed properties RFC in his example (allowing the addition of types to class properties). He then walks through the checkout of the PHP source, grabbing the pull request for the RFC and compiling PHP with the new code in place. He shows an example of a script that makes use of this new feature and tries it out. Finally, he covers how to run tests on this new version and some suggestions on adding typed properties to real-world projects.
On the Laravel News site there's a tutorial posted looking ahead at PHP 7.3 and some of the changes coming for JSON error handling.
One of the new features coming to PHP 7.3 is better error handling for json_encode() and json_decode(). The RFC was unanimously accepted by a 23 to 0 vote. Let’s take a look at how we handle JSON errors in <= PHP 7.2, and the new improvements coming in PHP 7.3.
They start with an example of how PHP developers would normally check for JSON parsing errors and the typical response when it fails. In the proposed functionality for PHP 7.3 and optional JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR would be added to throw a JsonException if there was an issue parsing the provided data. This also means that you no longer need to manually request the error message, it would just come through as a part of the standard exception. You can find out the full details on the change in the RFC.
Looking forward to the next larger release of the PHP language - PHP 7.3 - Ayesh Karunaratne has written up a post on his site sharing some of the new things that are coming and changes that will be made.
This is a live document (until PHP 7.3 is released as generally available) on changes and new features to expect in PHP 7.3, with code examples, relevant RFCs, and the rationale behind them, in their chronological order.
Currently there are five items on his list of features/changes approved and implemented for the 7.3 release:
While each item is a link to the actual RFC with more detail, he spends the rest of the post going through each and briefly outlining what they offer and code examples of them in use.
On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new post sharing some of the deprecations coming with PHP 7.2, the next release in the 7.x series (planned release sometime later this year).
PHP is a living language and as such, as some things are added, others are removed. Since PHP adheres to the best practice of Semantic Versioning, nothing will be going away in PHP 7.2, but some things will be marked as “Deprecated” so that developers can start removing them from their code and finding better ways to get the job done.PHP 7.2 brings us a new list of things that will be eventually going away. The complete list, as well as explinations and voting can be found at “PHP RFC: Deprecations for PHP 7.2”
They include a "hit list" of the functionality that will be affected including the removal of support for __autoload, the create_function function, removal of assert and the (unset) cast. The RFC has been moved to the "Accepted" state so now work will be done to make these and other deprecations happen in this next great release.
On the Stitcher.io blog there's a post that's advocating the addition of a feature to the core PHP language that several others have: generics. The basic idea behind generics is to provide functionality that allows the definition of entity types that can be reused as a default (like a "collection" generic that could be used instead of a base collection class).
In today's blog post we'll explore some common problems with arrays in PHP. All the problems and issues listed could be solved with a pending RFC which adds generics to PHP. We won't explore in too much detail what generics are. But at the end of this read, you should have a good idea as to why they are useful, and why we really want them in PHP. So without further ado, let's dive into the subject.
They start off with a common use case in PHP: a collection of blog posts and getting information from them. There's no guarantee that the contents of the set are always post objects leading to specific checks to ensure data quality before use. The post then uses a common example from PHP, the creation of a collection class to handle a set of objects and then showing how (with pseudo-code as generics aren't in the language) how that same functionality might look defined as a generic collection instead.
In this new post to the Laravel News site they list out some of the deprecations coming in PHP 7.2 based on this RFC.
The PHP 7.2 RFC for deprecating some current functionality has been approved. The following items are included in this list and will begin throwing deprecated notices.
The list of features to be deprecated includes:
Most of the things in the list are functionality that you just don't see much in recent PHP development. It could cause problems for older codebases but for those already on PHp 7 it shouldn't take much to make the necessary changes.
The Three Devs and a Maybe podcast has released their latest episode (#97) where hosts Michael Budd, Fraser Hart, Lewis Cains and Edd Mann are joined by internals developer Joe Watkins to talk about PHP RFCs targeted for PHP 7.1.
In this episode we are joined by Joe Watkins to discuss the many RFC’s that are in contention to be approved for PHP 7.1. We start off with a congratulations to Joe for his first PHP Release Manager position, highlighting what the role entails and how it is going. We then discuss the RFC process and how there has been a lot of activity over the past couple of weeks within this space.The concept of ‘Null’ is the first group of RFC’s we discuss, followed by union/intersection types and the pipe operator. We then move on to chat about short closure syntax, functional interfaces and lexical scope within anonymous classes. Finally, we bring up the comparable RFC which has been around for many years and the benefits of having attributes within the language.
In the show notes they have links to all of the RFCs mentioned in the episode (there's lots of them) for your easy reference. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed too.