There’s currently a proposal that’s under vote to add Scalar Typing to PHP (it has since been withdrawn).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.

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.

An interesting pull request has been opened against PHP to make bin2hex() constant time. This has lead to some interesting discussion on the mailing list (which even got me to reply :-X). There has been pretty good coverage over remote timing attacks in PHP, but they talk about string comparison. I’d like to talk about other types of timing attacks.

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.

Today, I did a talk at The Dutch PHP Conference 2013 on how PHP works under the hood. Click through for the slides!

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything here or on YouTube. I’ve been working on some interesting ideas that hopefully will be pretty decent, so it wasn’t time wasted. But I figured now would be a good time to tell you about some upcoming speaking engagements that I have, and where I’ll be over the next few months. So with no further adue:

The third video to my Programming With Anthony series is up! In this video, I talk about variables in PHP and how they work under the hood. I explain the difference between variable references and object references, along with the semantics of each. Give it a watch!

The other day, PHP 5.5 Alpha 1 was released to the public for the first round of testing the new features that are coming out. One of those new features is the Simplified Password Hashing API that I proposed (and was accepted). I have received a lot of feedback and criticism of the new API in the months since it’s been committed. I figured now that Alpha 1 is out and people can play with it, I should respond to some of those items, and give a little bit more insight into why it was built the way it was…

The concept of generators was recently proposed for addition in PHP’s core (Possibly for 5.5.0). While I believe that this is a great tool, it appears that many PHP developers aren’t familiar with the concept of generators. So I thought I would take a little time and explain some of how it works, and how it can be used to greatly simplify code.