The Three Devs & a Maybe podcast has published their latest episode, Episode #92 - Where is the Value? with Joe Watkins. This time hosts Michael Budd, Fraser Hart, Lewis Cains and Edd Mann are joined again by Joe Watkins, a core developer on the PHP language.

In this week’s episode we start off discussion with a recent PHP RFC Joe has been working on in-regard to typed properties, bringing up the value (if any) surrounding getters and setters. We then move on to Joe’s views on designing a programming language, and his mind-set that there should be no defined scope surrounding the features that the language should adopt. Finally, we wrap up the show with an update on how stabilisation of uopz is going for PHP 7, along with a reflection on the ‘Hacking on PHP 7’ screencasts we released earlier this month.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 of the show. You can also subscribe to their feed if you'd like this and other episodes (past and future) delivered right to your client of choice.

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.

In his latest post Joe Watkins talks about mocking PHP. No, not making fun of the language but rather mocking internal PHP functions and methods as a part of unit testing your application.

I work on a vast PHP code base, it is 3M LOC of PHP alone. It's somewhere between legacy and modern, work is ongoing. [...] When I joined the current project there were many many tests, they relied upon the kind of unholy magic that runkit allows you to perform, for the most part this worked okay for a while. However, runkit inexplicably caused many of the tests to fault, either at shutdown, or at random.

[...] So we were in a bit of a jam, I've always found runkit to be quite awkward, and now I'm staring its source code in the face knowing it represents a road block to my goal of running the latest stable versions of PHP, with the first decent optimizer that ever existed for Zend. I tackled the problem with code, code which I was allowed by my gracious employer to open source (the uopz extension).

He goes on to talk about what the actual root problem he was trying to solve was (dodging code with built-in functions), the "obvious" way to solve it using runkit or the more modern solution that uses the uopz extension. He provides an example of it in use mocking the fopen function with a "uopz_function" wrapper.