Programming

PHP6 Planning

    Harry Fuecks
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    This is all over Planet PHP but in case you missed it,
    Derick has published minutes from a core developer meet up in Paris regarding the future of PHP 6.

    Jeff has posted some very positive feelings. Likewise think there’s some great stuff coming.

    Dont have time for a detailed review right now (Maarten?) so some shorts. The Unicode / i18n support that’s being planned is a big one – if you’re wondering what ICU is, have a look here – it’s not a toy project. Register globals is dead, long live input filters. PHP6 is going to mean more BC breaks but for the right reasons. Namespaces are back in play but with a a lingering ‘?’ hanging around (so don’t raise hopes).

    Of course, like everyone who’s not contributing to the core, I’ve got an “opinion” about rejected changes that I need to rant about: delegates – was incited by this comment “We did not see any real-world code example”. Allow me to provide…

    Covered delegates a long time ago here (calling them Decorators) with reference to real world projects using them, like this one. The way they have to be implemented with PHP today is probablematic for two reasons – first you have write a significant amount of “dumb” code like this and second, you’re injecting a ton of “worthless” method calls which carry a significant performance overhead. If it was possible to eliminate the latter which could (perhaps) be eliminated in some smart way at engine level. Some smart syntax to specify a delegate / decorator would be cool and yet cooler would be some smart engine-level elimination of the redundant calls.

    Rant done – thanks for listening.