The PHP Foundation currently supports six part-time PHP contributors who work on maintenance and new features for PHP. Maintenance is not limited to fixing bugs, but also includes work to reduce technical debt, making life easier for everyone working on PHP. The contributors funded by the PHP Foundation collaborate with other contributors on code, documentation, and discussions.

PHP 8.2 Released

PHP 8.3 RFCs and Discussions

Recent RFCs, Merged PRs, Discussions, and Commits

Changes and improvements to PHP are discussed, reported, and voted on by the PHP Foundation Team, the PHP development team, and contributors. Bug reports are made to the PHP issue tracker, changes are discussed in mailing lists, minor code changes are proposed as pull requests, and major changes are discussed in detail and voted on as PHP RFCs. Documentation and the php.net website changes are also discussed and improved at their relevant Git repositories on GitHub.

RFC Updates

• RFC In Voting: Readonly amendments 💜
  RFC by Nicolas Grekas and Máté Kocsis, attempts to address some of the shortcomings of PHP 8.1 readonly properties and 8.2 readonly classes.
  This RFC proposes allowing readonly classes to be extended by non-readonly classes (currently not allowed, and causes a fatal error), and to allow reinitializing readonly properties during cloning (within the __clone() magic method).
  
  
• RFC Accepted: More Appropriate Date/Time Exceptions 💜
  RFC by Derick Rethans, proposed to introduce Date/Time extension-specific exceptions and errors. This detailed RFC suggests more specificity in the exceptions with exception classes such as DateInvalidTimeZoneException, and DateMalformedPeriodStringException, as well as promoting some of the current PHP warnings to Error exceptions.
  
  The vote was accepted, and the pull-request is nearly ready to be merged.
  
  
• RFC Implemented: Randomizer Additions
  RFC by Joshua Rüsweg and Tim Düsterhus, proposed to add new “building block” methods to \Random\Randomizer (added in PHP 8.2) that implement commonly useful operations that are either verbose or very hard to implement in userland.
  
  The RFC proposed to add two new methods: getBytesFromString(), to generate a random string containing specific characters, and getFloat()/nextFloat(), to generate a random floating point value.
  
  
• RFC Under Discussion: Pass Scope to Magic Accessors 💜
  RFC by Nicolas Grekas and Ilija Tovilo, proposing to pass the calling scope to magic accessors to make it trivial to get it. While it is currently possible to retrieve the calling scope by retrieving the backtrace, the RFC proposes to pass the calling scope as the last argument to the magic methods, making it easier compared to fiddling with the debug backtrace.
  
  
• RFC Under Discussion: Path to Saner Increment/Decrement operators 💜
  PHP's increment and decrement operators can have some surprising behaviours when used with types other than int and float. Various previous attempts (1, 2, 3) have been made to improve the behaviour of these operators, but none have been implemented.
  
  The goal of this RFC by George Peter Banyard is to normalize the behaviour of $v++ and $v-- to be the same as $v += 1 and $v -= 1, respectively.
  
  
• RFC Under Discussion: Saner array_(sum|product)() 💜
  RFC by George Peter Banyard suggests improvements to the existing array_sum() and array_product() functions by emitting a warning when the arrays being summed/multiplied contain invalid types. This can introduce backwards-incompatible effects (apart from the warning) on code that relies on the current behavior of the functions.
  
  
• RFC Under Discussion: Add SameSite cookie attribute parameter 💜
  RFC by George Peter Banyard proposes adding support for SameSite cookies as a function parameter to setcookie, setrawcookie, and session_set_cookie_params functions. While PHP 7.3 and later supports SameSite cookies when the cookie options are passed as an array, this RFC proposes to add a new parameter that accepts a SameSite enum value. The proposed SameSite enum contains Strict, Lax, and None members, which are the only accepted values.
  
  
• RFC Under Discussion: Add file_descriptor() function 💜
  RFC by George Peter Banyard proposes a new file_descriptor() function that returns the integer file descriptor of a given stream, if the underlying file system supports it.
  
  
• RFC Declined: Asymmetric Visibility 💜
  PHP’s property visibility modifiers (public, protected, and private) apply to both get and set operations. This RFC by Ilija Tovilo and Larry Garfield proposed a new syntax inspired by Swift to asymmetrically declare the visibility modifiers individually for get and set operations: 
  
  

• class Foo
  {
      public private(set) string $bar;
  }

• In the snippet above, public private(set)indicates that get operations are public, while set operations are private.
  
  However, the vote held for this RFC did not pass. A lengthy mailing list discussion on this RFC is available here.

Notable Mailing List Discussions

• base64url format
• PHP build for the wasm32-wasi target
• A set of 18 functions/changes to improve PHP core
• PHP support for matrix operations - BLAS, LAPACK
• Unicode Text Processing
• Deprecate ldap_connect with host and port as separate arguments
• Introduce the ability to use the first-call-callable syntax on non-static methods, statically
• Loading SQLite extensions on PDO
• rules for #include directives

Merged PRs and Commits

• Alex Dowad continued with his series of improvements in mbstring extension optimizations. PHP 8.2 received several impactful performance improvements in mbstring extension too.
• Tim Düsterhus made several improvements and fixes to the new "random" extension.
• Max Kellermann made several improvements in making several pointers const, along with a new RFC to clean up PHP source's header include calls.

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