There’s currently a proposal that’s under vote to add Scalar Typing to PHP (it has since been withdrawn). It’s been a fairly controversial RFC, but at this point in time it’s currently passing with 67.8% of votes. If you want a simplified breakdown of the proposal, check out Pascal Martin’s excellent post about it. What I want to talk about is more of an opinion. Why I believe this is the correct approach to the problem.

I have now forked the original proposal and will be bringing it to a vote shortly.

After yesterday’s post, I decided to do some math to see how many PHP installs had at least 1 known security vulnerability. So I went to grab statistics from W3Techs, and correlated that with known Linux Distribution supported numbers. I then whipped up a spreadsheet and got some interesting numbers out of it. So interesting, that I need to share…

If you’ve been following the news, you’ll have noticed that yesterday Composer got a bit of a speed boost. And by “bit of a speed boost”, we’re talking between 50% and 90% reduction in runtime depending on the complexity of the dependencies. But how did the fix work? And should you make the same sort of change to your projects? For those of you who want the TL/DR answer: the answer is no you shouldn’t.

There has been a lot of talk about typing in PHP lately. There are a couple of popular proposals for how to clean up PHP’s APIs to be simpler. Most of them involve changing PHP’s type system at a very fundamental level. So I thought it would be a good idea to talk about that. What goes into a type?

This is a post that I didn’t want to write. Actually, it’s a post that I still don’t want to write. But I find myself in a situation where I feel that I have to say something. So I’m going to just open up here. I’m going to put it all out on the table, and see what happens from there.

I was asked an interesting question via email yesterday. The question is fairly simple. The answer, not so much… So, rather than reply in an email, I figured that I’d write a post about it instead. The question, simply stated, is: When comparing a float to an integer using ==, where does the conversion happen?

So, let’s begin…

I read a rather interesting post yesterday called PHP: a fractal of bad design. It’s been getting a lot of traffic among the PHP community lately because it’s rather inflammatory. But to be honest, it does make a lot of really good points. It also makes a lot of mistakes and misses a bigger picture.

Part 4 of the PHP’s Source Code for PHP Developers series is up over on Nikic’s Blog. In it, he discusses how arrays are handled in PHP internals. He talks a lot about hash tables and symbol tables, and how they work together to make PHP a working language. Part 5 will be back over here, and we’ll talk about objects and classes! Enjoy!

In this third post of the PHP's Source Code for PHP Developers series, we’re going to expand on the prior posts to help understand how PHP works internally. In the first post of the series, we looked at how to view PHP’s source code, how it’s structured as well as some basic C pointers for PHP developers. The second post introduced functions into the mix. This time around, we’re going to dive into one of the most useful structures in PHP: variables.

Part 2 of the PHP’s Source Code for PHP Developers series is up over on Nikic’s Blog. In it, he discusses how internal PHP functions are defined, and how to figure out what they do. Part 3 will be back over here and will cover how variables work internally (The ZVAL). Enjoy!