At the beginning of 2024, The PHP Foundation is a collective of 9 volunteer board members, 1 full-time operations manager sponsored by JetBrains, and 10 developers paid part-time/full-time who make more than half of the contributions to the PHP language and its extensions.

In 2023, The PHP Foundation received $418,669 in financial contributions from organizations and individuals.

The PHP Foundation’s main focus in 2023 was strengthening the maintenance of PHP core, the project that lives in the php/php-src GitHub repository. This project is the home of the PHP language, where PHP’s interpreter is developed. Everyone who uses PHP benefits in one way or another from the work that is done in this repository.

The PHP Foundation demonstrates its growing impact on the language through an increased volume and velocity of code contributions and reviews. The 6 part-time and full-time developers contracted by The PHP Foundation were responsible for nearly half of the commits and reviews made in the PHP language.

Moreover, the foundation's presence and activities have led to heightened interest and activity in the PHP project overall, with the total number of contributions to the language growing by 79% compared to 2022.

At the end of 2023, the German government’s Sovereign Tech Fund chose to invest in The PHP Foundation’s mission by providing funding for a security audit and other long outstanding projects critical for the PHP ecosystem.

The foundation is expanding its development efforts in 2024 by contracting 4 additional developers and increasing the number of hours that current contracted developers are working.

The foundation plans to spend up to $1,045,000, including compensation and fees. We are looking for additional sponsor contributions to allow us to continue these efforts in the next years.

In 2024, we aim to achieve the following strategic goals:

• Ensure sustainable sponsorship for the foundation.
• Ensure that foundation developers focus on valuable tasks.
• Promote PHP within the web development ecosystem.

The PHP Foundation Mission

The PHP Foundation was initiated by JetBrains, Automattic, Laravel, Acquia, Zend, Private Packagist, Symfony, Craft CMS, and Tideways. It was publicly launched on November 22, 2021.

Since 2021, many companies and individuals have joined the initiative. To make the priorities of the foundation more clear and aligned, we’ve updated the mission statement:

The PHP Foundation’s mission is to ensure the long-term prosperity of the PHP language. The PHP Foundation focuses on providing financial support and guidance to PHP language developers to support its goals of improving the language for its users, providing high-quality maintenance, and improving the PHP language project to retain current contributors and to integrate new contributors. The PHP Foundation aims to promote the public image of the PHP language in the interest of retaining existing and gaining new users and contributors.

So it defines 4 priorities of the foundation:

1. Improve the language for users.
2. Provide high-quality maintenance.
3. Improve the project to retain current contributors and to integrate new contributors.
4. Promote the public image of PHP.

Organizational Growth

Many companies with a vested interest in PHP’s prosperity made a major financial contribution during the year. These are the companies that contributed $10,000 or more in 2023:

JetBrains, Automattic, Private Packagist, Craft CMS, Tideways, pixiv Inc., Mercari Inc., Symfony Corp, Aternos GmbH, Sentry, Ardennes-étape, Zend by Perforce, Les-Tilleuls.coop, Cybozu.

Overall, 718 organizations and individuals sponsored the foundation in 2023 on Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors.

Quotes

Here is what some of the prominent folks say about the foundation.

The Sovereign Tech Fund Investment

The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital infrastructure in the public interest. Its goal is to strengthen the open-source ecosystem sustainably, focusing on security, resilience, technological diversity, and the people behind the code. STF is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) and supported by the German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation GmbH (SPRIND).

We have collaborated with STF to create work plans for these specific projects:

PECL overhaul

The current system for distributing PHP extensions, PECL/PEAR, is outdated and prone to supply-chain attacks, making it unreliable for average developers. This leads to the creation of redundant tools and new security issues.

We proposed to rewrite the PECL installer, replacing the messy pear code and the inefficient website.

Follow the progress of the new tool 🥧PIE here: https://github.com/ThePHPF/pie-design.

Testing tool for FPM

Currently, the PHP project's testing framework lacks more specialized support for the automated testing of the FastCGI Process Manager (FPM), especially for issues that require higher load. We propose to develop an FPM/SAPI testing tool that can execute all applications and set expectations on the produced logs and server responses. This tool will be connected with a load testing tool (e.g., wrk) to simulate real-world usage and load.

The work has started in the https://github.com/bukka/wst repository with the plan to move it to the PHP GitHub organization when ready.

Security Audit

PHP, like any other language, has its share of security issues. We are going to collaborate with a security research group for a comprehensive codebase audit and address the discovered issues. This will significantly improve the security of PHP and make it more reliable for developers and businesses.

The audit is being organized in partnership with OSTIF.

Documentation improvements

The current PHP documentation has several blind spots, with many functions and methods not covered at all. We propose to update and modernize the English PHP documentation, review and remove user comments, integrate 3v4l.org for interactive examples, and simplify the maintenance process. This will make PHP more accessible to new developers and serve as a reliable reference for experienced ones.

The PHP Foundation Governance

In 2023, we renamed the Administration group to the Governing Board to avoid confusions and better align with industry standards.

The lineup of the group has not changed and consists of veteran PHP community leaders, representatives of the founding companies, and other key stakeholders.

One notable change compared to the previous year is a full-time operations manager sponsored by JetBrains in addition to the financial contribution.

We aim to establish a level of involvement for other key stakeholders from the PHP world through the Advisory Board and other initiatives.

The Advisory Board

To keep major sponsors of PHP abreast of the latest happenings in the foundation and allow them to see the direct impact of their support, we announced the advisory board initiative in March.

In addition to the Governing Board representatives from Automattic, JetBrains, Private Packagist, Symfony, Tideways, and Zend by Perforce, the Advisory Board includes members from Moodle, Shopware, Laravel, Ardennes-étape, Les-Tilleuls.coop / API Platform, Aternos GmbH, PrestaShop, CraftCMS.

Your company can become a member by contributing a minimum of $12,000 to The PHP Foundation as at least a Silver Sponsor.

The PHP Foundation Staff

Renewing contracts

In 2023, we had a team of 6 developers. All of them demonstrated a high quality of work and dedication to the mission of the foundation. We were happy to renew the contracts for 2024 as well as extend the total number of hours for developers requesting it.

We have also adjusted the compensation rates for developers to better reflect the market, as the rates had not changed since 2021.

We aim to review the rates every year based on the available funding and priorities.

Team extension

As was mentioned in the previous transparency report, we aimed to extend the team. It did not happen in 2023 because one of the prospective developers could not join the team for personal reasons, and had to step down from PHP core development entirely. Again, this is the Bus Factor at its worst. However, we were able to extend the team starting with 2024.

We accepted applications for developer positions from September through October 2023. We received about 200 resumes, and we’ve chosen 4 developers with a proven track record of contributions to the PHP language and ecosystem.

We offered the new developers 6-month trial contracts so that the developers and the Governing Board can evaluate the results and then decide whether to continue the engagements.

The team as of 2024

Starting from January, we now contract 10 developers to work on PHP:

• Arnaud Le Blanc @arnaud-lb
• David Carlier @devnexen
• Derick Rethans @derickr
• Gina Peter Banyard @Girgias
• Ilija Tovilo @iluuu1994
• Jakub Zelenka @bukka
• James Titcumb @asgrim
• Máté Kocsis @kocsismate
• Saki Takamachi @SakiTakamachi
• Shivam Mathur @shivammathur

Team timeline

We established the following timeline for team review.

• January 2024: Developers start work according to the new contracts.
• May 2024: Evaluate new developers, contracts are extended, expanded, or terminated after the first 6 months.
• September 2024: Open applications for new developers, evaluate performance of the current group of developers.
• October 2024: Evaluate applications, work out updates to compensation, decide on a budget.
• November 2024: Renew contracts with existing developers, potentially sign contracts with new developers.

And in 2025 we start the cycle again.

Retrospective: Goals of 2023

In the previous report, we outlined a few organizational and technical goals. Let’s look back and evaluate the results.

Organization goals

• Extend the foundation developers team. ✅
  We did not grow in 2023 strictly speaking, but the work done in 2023 helped to build the ground for two contracted developers to go full-time, as well as to hire 4 new developers.
  
  
• Grow the community of the foundation. ✅
  The foundation’s Slack became a hub for the community and helped to move initiatives.
  
  
• Improve communication and provide clear benefits for sponsors. ✅
  We created a deck with benefits for sponsors and started the advisory board initiative.
  
  
• Explore strategic partnerships and marketing opportunities. ✅ / ❌
  We received investment from the Sovereign Tech Fund and started collaboration with OSTIF.
  We did not explore any marketing opportunities. And there is a room for many more strategic partnerships.

Technical goals

• Ongoing maintenance and development of the PHP core. ✅
  
  
• Improve the quality of the ideas and RFCs coming from the foundation. ✅
  One of the examples here could be Property Hooks RFC. Although it has not been voted on yet, we have put amazing work into it and consulted many different parties to make it as good as possible.
  
  
• Develop a high-level roadmap and vision for PHP changes sponsored by the foundation. ❌
  The roadmap and vision need further development and discussion. However, we conducted several pieces of research, both quantitative and qualitative. Some of these findings were shared at conferences where we participated, including PHPCon Poland, SymfonyCon, and Laracon EU. We plan to continue this work.

PHP Language Impact

On a daily basis, the PHP Foundation staff team contributes to the open-source repositories of the PHP GitHub organization. The foundation team contributes in many forms: filing issues, reviewing pull requests, participating in discussions on mailing lists, triaging issues, submitting RFC proposals.

In this document, four categories of contributions are presented in more detail: commits to php-src, reviews of pull requests on php-src, submitted RFC documents, and documentation work.

Commits to PHP

The following chart summarizes the number of commits made to the php/php-src repository in 2023.

Note that the number of commits does not fairly represent the level of effort or the scope of the work. However, it can demonstrate the foundation's relative level of contribution to the PHP core through an objective metric.

Reviews

The diagram summarizes the number of pull request reviews made in the php/php-src repository from January 1 to December 31, 2023.

RFCs

Below are the RFC proposals authored or co-authored by The PHP Foundation developers in 2023 (random order).

Release Maintenance

Jakub Zelenka, one of the foundation developers, also volunteered to be a release manager for PHP 8.3. The PHP Foundation supported such an initiative.

The PHP Foundation brand & public channels

The PHP Foundation represents a community of core PHP developers and advocates for the PHP programming language. The channels listed below were used by the PHP Foundation for public communication:

• 11,481 Twitter followers https://twitter.com/thephpf
• 10,320 LinkedIn page followers https://www.linkedin.com/company/phpfoundation
• 684 Mastodon followers https://phpc.social/@thephpf

The PHP Foundation members gave talks at multiple conferences throughout the year:

• PHP UK Conference – Derick Rethans
• International PHP Conference – Nils Adermann, Benjamin Eberlei
• FrOSCon – Sebastian Bergmann
• php[tek] – Derick Rethans
• DrupalCon Lille - Nils Adermann
• betterCode(PHP) – Jakub Zalenka
• ForumPHP – Gina P. Banyard
• PHPCon Poland – Roman Pronskiy
• SymfonyCon – Nicolas Grekas

Official Recognition on the PHP website

The PHP Foundation is now officially endorsed on the php.net website. This was the result of a community vote on RFC Promote the PHP Foundation. Big thanks to Jim Winstead and the PHP community for this.

Financial report

In 2023, The PHP Foundation was financially backed by organizations and individuals with the goal of paying a competitive salary to as many core developers as possible.

* Fees include a 10% Open Source Collective fiscal host fee (dealing with contracts, expense reviews and payments, bank account management, official registrations and dealing with government requirements, open collective platform development etc.), and 1-5% percent of payment processing fees, depending on the payment method used.

All incoming and outgoing transactions of The PHP Foundation are publicly available to view for anyone: https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation#category-BUDGET

Expenses

https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation/expenses

Goals for 2024

Our foremost mission remains the same: maintain and develop the PHP language. We’d like PHP to be the best platform for users and for businesses creating web applications and APIs.

The main challenge for continuing the work of The PHP Foundation is to ensure sustainable sponsorship.

From a technical standpoint, the goal is to ensure that foundation developers work on valuable tasks.

Organization goals

• Onboard new major sponsors.
• Explore strategic partnerships and marketing opportunities.
• Further develop the Advisory Board initiative.
• Grow the foundation's community.

Technical goals

• Ongoing maintenance and development of the PHP core.
• Deliver the STF projects.
• Improve the quality of the ideas and RFCs coming from the foundation.
• Conduct research and surveys to define priorities.
• Develop a high-level roadmap for PHP changes sponsored by the foundation.

Budget plan for 2024

In 2024, two of our part-time developers extended commitment to go full-time, and we contracted 4 new developers.

We have also adjusted the compensation rates for developers to better reflect the market, as the rates had not changed since 2021. As a result, our budget significantly increased.

With this plan, we estimate our annual spending cap at approximately $840,000 for developer compensation.

Additionally, we anticipate receiving €205,000 from the STF investment. These funds will be allocated to developer reimbursements and our partnership with OSTIF.org for an external security audit.

Our collaboration with the OpenCollective platform has been positive, and we plan to continue operating under the umbrella of the Open Source Collective in 2024. This means that sponsorships we receive are reduced by 10% for Open Source Collective fees and 1–5% for payment processing fees.

Outro

The PHP language is a living entity and, as such, requires continuous support to address developer issues, resolve security vulnerabilities, and has to evolve to meet the needs of the future.

Based on the strong second year of the foundation, we are excited to continue and multiply the efforts in the next years.

With your help, we continue the mission to support, advance, and develop the PHP language.

Since April 2022, the PHP Foundation has contracted six outstanding developers:

• Arnaud Le Blanc @arnaud-lb
• Derick Rethans @derickr
• Gina Peter Banyard @Girgias
• Ilija Tovilo @iluuu1994
• Jakub Zelenka @bukka
• Máté Kocsis @kocsismate

All of them started as part-time contributors, and since then have significantly grown their capacity and dedication to PHP core tasks. We consider it a big achievement that the team continues to collaborate effectively, accumulating more experience and knowledge, and expanding their PHP Core involvement.

Team Update 2024

We are happy to announce a team expansion. Four talented developers are joining as part-time team members of the foundation.

• David Carlier @devnexen
• James Titcumb @asgrim
• Saki Takamachi @SakiTakamachi
• Shivam Mathur @shivammathur

Please give them a warm welcome! We are looking forward to the great things we will accomplish together.

Happy New Year! 🎉🐘💜

This post provides insights into The PHP Foundation's recent activities.

My name is Roman Pronskiy. I’m employed by JetBrains to manage operations at the PHP Foundation. Reach out to me at pronskiy@thephp.foundation.

You can find the full foundation structure here, including all board members, developers, and the community.

Team Growth

In September, we initiated an open call for new developers to join the PHP Foundation by launching an application form.

We received a total of 207 applications. From this pool, we selected a shortlist of 12 qualified candidates. Following a comprehensive review and input from existing foundation members, we further refined our selection to 4 outstanding individuals. We will soon announce the new members.

The primary focus for the new developers will be on the maintenance and modernization of PHP’s infrastructure — a critical step towards ensuring PHP being a robust and forward-looking language.

The public work undertaken by our developers can be followed in our monthly "PHP Core Roundup" series, which highlights the ongoing progress and developments within PHP core.

Advisory Board

For our major sponsors, we offer exclusive insights through occasional digests that provide a deeper dive into discussions, debates, and early-stage developments. This not only keeps our sponsors abreast of the latest happenings but also allows them to see the direct impact of their support. This is one of the benefits of being an Advisory Board member.

We announced the advisory board initiative in March. Since then, 9 companies have joined the initiative with their representatives.

In addition to the Governing Board that includes Automattic, JetBrains, Private Packagist, Symfony, Tideways, Zend by Perforce, and PHP fellows, we now welcome the Advisory Board members: Moodle, Shopware, Laravel, Ardennes-étape, Les-Tilleuls.coop / API Platform, Aternos GmbH, PrestaShop, CraftCMS.

There were several useful discussions within the group. Specifically, we’d like to highlight the one around Property Hooks RFC. The Advisory Board feedback helped to shape the proposal design significantly.

By the way, you can already try property hooks on 3v4l.org, thanks to Sjon Hortensius.

Sovereign Tech Fund invests in PHP

The Sovereign Tech Fund is an organization that supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital infrastructure in the public interest. Its goal to strengthen the open-source ecosystem sustainably, focusing on security, resilience, technological diversity, and the people behind the code. STF is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) and supported by the German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation GmbH (SPRIND).

We have collaborated with STF to create work plans for these specific projects: PECL overhaul, Testing tool for FPM, Security Audit, and Documentation improvements.

We’ll share more details on each project early next year, and for now we are thrilled and grateful to the Sovereign Tech Fund for trusting us.

Security audit of PHP is coming

As mentioned above, STF is investing in PHP, and we are going to commission an audit of PHP's C code base. We expect security issues to be found. To mitigate possible bad perception, we aim to publish and fix the revealed security issues at the same time.

For this security audit, we are partnering with The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund, Inc (OSTIF), a corporate non-profit dedicated to securing critical open-source projects. They have a proven track record of audits for popular open-source projects such as cURL, Git, Linux Kernel, OpenSSL, Node.js, and others.

Reports schedule

Although we promised to prepare quarterly reports, that unfortunately did not happen to be feasible. So for 2023, we fall back to one yearly report. The 2023 transparency report will be published in December.

Meet us at the conferences

You can meet our team at the following conferences in late 2023:

betterCode(PHP) – Nov 27

Jakub Zalenka will give a talk: "PHP 8.3: Changes and future plans".
Besides Jakub, there will be talks from Niels Dossche and Sebastian Bergmann.

SymfonyCon Brussels – Dec 7–8

You’ll be able to meet and talk to our board members: Nils Adermann, Sebastian Bergmann, Nicolas Grekas, and Roman Pronskiy.

Thank you to our sponsors

Check out the Sponsors section on our website. It shows all major contributors sorted by donation amount.

Big thanks to the Sentry team for sponsoring the PHP foundation!

Sentry is a popular application performance monitoring & error tracking tool, and they just gave $500,000 to multiple open source maintainers.

Shout-out to non-financial sponsors

Digital Ocean has been supporting the PHP project for ages – php.net servers run on DigitalOcean boxes. We would like to express our gratitude to DigitalOcean for their ongoing support.

Big thanks to everyone for your continued support – the PHP Foundation is all of us!

That’s all for today. Follow us on Twitter @ThePHPF or Mastodon phpc.social/@thephpf to get the latest updates from the PHP Foundation. 💜🐘

PHP 8.3 is here! Bringing a handful of new features, performance and functionality improvements, and a healthy amount of deprecations, PHP 8.3 was released today.

PHP 8.3 will continue to receive active support for two years, followed by one year of security updates. Similar to the PHP 8.2 upgrade, the PHP 8.3 upgrade will be smooth as backward compatiblity is maintained. While some functionality is deprecated, there are no syntax, API*, and remove functionality in this release.

What's in PHP 8.3

Some of the major new features in PHP 8.3 include support for declaring a type for class constants, improvements to support deep-cloning of readonly properties, improvements to the new Random extension introduced in PHP 8.2, new json_validate(),str_increment(), and str_decrement(), functions, and a noticeable amount of improvements in DateTime, DOM, and Intl extensions.

See the PHP 8.3 release page for what's new and changed in PHP 8.3.

(*) Note that some of the PHP core extensions now declare types for built-in class constants. This is technically a BC break in case child classes declare the same constants without type declaration, which is only supported in PHP 8.3.

Upgrade to PHP 8.3

PHP packages on software repositories such as Debian and Ubuntu repos maintained by Ondřej Surý, Remi Collet for Fedora/RHEL/EL already contain PHP 8.3 builds ready to install.

Windows builds for PHP 8.3 are available on windows.php.net

Docker images with PHP 8.3 will also be available on Docker hub in the coming days.

PHP 8.3 Release in Numbers

The PHP 8.3 release contains over 1200 code commits from 114 awesome contributors to the php-src repository, and several more contributions to the documentation and its translations.

Contributions from the PHP Foundation members consist of over 280 commits.

During the period from the PHP 8.2 release date and today, the PHP Internals mailing list has received over 2800 emails.

PHP RFCs, where major changes to PHP are proposed, discussed, and voted on, PHP 8.3 received 23 RFCs that went to a vote, and 18 RFCs passed. This includes a number includes "catch-all" RFCs such as Deprecations for PHP 8.3, where multiple changes were voted at the same time. Out of the 23 RFCs with votes, 13 RFCs were either proposed or implemented by the PHP Foundation members.

The PHP documentation and php.net web site contributors have also made several impactful contributions to document the new features in PHP 8.3, prepare release pages, and more.

💜 Thank you 💜

On behalf of the PHP Foundation, we take this post to thank everyone from this milestone in PHP. Your contributions to the PHP Foundation, code and documentation contributions, and several other ways of involvement and contributions help shape PHP to continue to be an exciting, feature-rich, and versatile programming language.

Thank you 💜

PHP 8.4 Outlook

PHP 8.4, scheduled for the end of 2024 is already taking shape. Even at the moment PHP 8.3 is released, there are three active RFC votes, and some major changes such as JIT-IR, a brand-new HTML 5 parser in the DOM extension based on Lexbor, and Bcrypt default cost increasing already been implemented for PHP 8.4

We look forward to bringing you updates on our PHP Core Roundup series and our newsletter:

💜️ 🐘

PHP Roundup is prepared by Ayesh Karunaratne from PHP.Watch, a source for PHP News, Articles, Upcoming Changes, and more.

The PHP Foundation is a collective of PHP contributors, veterans, and companies that collaborate to ensure the long-term sustainability of the PHP programming language. The foundation currently supports six contributors focused on PHP's maintenance, debt reduction, and feature development. These contributors work closely with others on coding, documentation, and discussions.

Started over a year ago, the PHP Core Roundup series offers a summary of the latest developments, discussions, and news about PHP Core, contributed by both PHP Foundation members and other participants. This post is the thirteenth in the PHP Core Roundup series.

Releases

The PHP development team released two new versions in October 2023:

PHP 8.2.12 and PHP 8.1.25

These releases include several bug fixes and improvements, notably in areas such as Core, CLI, CType, DOM, Fileinfo, Filter, Hash, Intl, MySQLnd, Opcache, PCRE, SimpleXML, Streams, XML, and XSL.

Recent RFCs and Mailing List Discussions

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.

Hundreds of awesome PHP contributors put their efforts into improvements to the PHP code base, documentation, and the php.net website. Here is a summary of some changes made by the people behind PHP. Things marked with 💜 are done by the PHP Foundation team.

PHP 8.3 GA to be released this month!

PHP 8.3.0 GA is scheduled to be released on November 23rd. PHP 8.3.0 RC5 is already released, and RC6 (the last one) is scheduled for November, 9.

PHP 8.3.0 RC versions are available in Remi’s repos for Fedora/RHEL, Ondrej's repos for Debian/Ubuntu LTS, Docker images on Docker Hub, and compiled Windows binaries on windows.php.net.

PHP 8.0 will reach EOL

PHP 8.0 will reach its End of Life (EOL) and will no longer receive security updates after November 26, 2023. You can always check the release and support schedule at php.net/supported-versions.php:

RFC Updates

Following are the RFCs and major pull-requests discussed, voted, and implemented since our last update.

In Voting: Straw poll - How to name the Process resource after it is converted to an object by Máté Kocsis 💜

As part of PHP's efforts in gradually phrasing out resource objects (php-tasks#6, article on PHP.Watch), this RFC polls the proposed names for the resource object class name that replaces Process resources. This ranked-choice poll (following STV) intends to pick a name from \Process, \ProcessHandle, and \OS\Process.

Implemented: Increasing the default BCrypt cost by Tim Düsterhus

RFC was approved unanimously, but in the second vote, where a new cost value had to be determined, opinions were divided.

The cost will be increased to 12 in PHP 8.4.

Implemented: XML_OPTION_PARSE_HUGE by Niels Dossche

A new option will be added to the event-driven (SAX) XmlParser that would allow it to parse large documents.

Accepted: DOM HTML5 parsing and serialization by Niels Dossche

PHP 8.4 will get new classes: DOM\HTMLDocument and DOM\XMLDocument to the dom extension. Existing dom classes in the global namespace get an alias in the new DOM namespace.

The HTMLDocument class will add support for HTML5 document parsing and serializing. The XMLDocument class serves as a modern alternative to \DOMDocument, which is retained for compatibility. These new classes also provide a more misuse-resistant API for loading documents.

Accepted: A new JIT implementation based on IR Framework by Dmitry Stogov

RFC proposed a new JIT implementation based on a separately developed IR Framework. The main advantage of the new approach is that PHP source code will be freed from the low-level details of JIT compilation. The downside is a longer JIT-compilation time.

The proposal was accepted, so Dmitry Stogov merged the new JIT into the master which means it will be available in PHP 8.4.

Under discussion: RFC1867 for non-POST HTTP verbs by Ilija Tovilo 💜

Now PHP supports the parsing of multipart/form-data content type natively, but only for POST requests. If POST request has the multipart/form-data content type, the request body is immediately consumed before starting the PHP script and populated into the $_POST and $_FILES superglobals.

RFC proposes to add a new function request_parse_body() to expose the existing functionality to userland so that it may be used for other HTTP verbs.

Under discussion: Rounding Integers as int by Marc Bennewitz

Currently round(), ceil() and floor() functions return float numbers, but when using integers above 2^53 you get unexpected results due to loss of precision.

RFC proposes to perform rounding for a given integer and returning the resulting integer if possible.

Under discussion: Unbundle ext/imap, ext/pspell, ext/oci8, and ext/PDO_OCI by Derick Rethans 💜

RFC proposes to unbundle these extensions: remove them from the PHP source distribution, and move them to PECL.

Under discussion: Multibyte for trim function mb_trim, mb_ltrim and mb_rtrim by Yuya Hamada

RFC proposes to add multibyte support for trim functions.

Under discussion: Change the edge case of round() by Saki Takamachi

RFC proposes to change the round() behavior, and stop expecting decimal behavior to float point and start expecting floating point to behave as floating point.

Documentation

While PHP 8.3 is just around the corner, the documentation available on php.net, requires updating.

Gina P. Banyard 💜 is tracking the progress for PHP 8.3 related changes in php/doc-en#2796, and also triaged issues in the docs and marked several of them as "good first time", which are ideal easy picks if you would like to start contributing to PHP docs. You can find the full list on GitHub.

Merged PRs and Commits

Following are some changes that did not go through an RFC process because they are either planned, bug fixes, or progressive enhancements.

Full list of commits since PHP Core Roundup #17

Commits are in the order they were added, grouped by author in alphabetical order.

We are incredibly grateful for the commitment and dedication of all contributors. Stay tuned for next month's roundup as we continue to make PHP better together.

Support PHP Foundation

At The PHP Foundation, we support, promote, and advance the PHP language. We financially support six PHP core developers to contribute to the PHP project. You can help support PHP Foundation on OpenCollective or via GitHub Sponsors.

A big thanks to all our sponsors — PHP Foundation is all of us!

Follow us on Twitter @ThePHPF to get the latest updates from the Foundation.

💜️ 🐘

PHP Roundup is prepared by Ayesh Karunaratne from PHP.Watch, a source for PHP News, Articles, Upcoming Changes, and more.

The PHP Foundation is a collective of PHP contributors, veterans, and companies that collaborate to ensure the long-term sustainability of the PHP programming language. The foundation currently supports six contributors focused on PHP's maintenance, debt reduction, and feature development. These contributors work closely with others on coding, documentation, and discussions.

Started over a year ago, the PHP Core Roundup series offers a summary of the latest developments, discussions, and news about PHP Core, contributed by both PHP Foundation members and other participants. This post is the thirteenth in the PHP Core Roundup series.

PHP Security Audit organized by The PHP Foundation 💜

The PHP Foundation intends to conduct a security audit of the PHP source code. Derick Rethans 💜 has asked the PHP Internals mailing list for input on which sections of the PHP source code should be prioritized in this audit. Feel free to join the conversation if you have suggestions.

Releases

The PHP development team released two new versions in September 2023:

PHP 8.2.11 and PHP 8.1.24

These releases include several bug fixes and improvements, notably in areas such as Core, DOM, Iconv, Intl, MySQLnd, ODBC, SimpleXML, SPL, and SQLite3.

Recent RFCs and Mailing List Discussions

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.

Hundreds of awesome PHP contributors put their efforts into improvements to the PHP code base, documentation, and the php.net website. Here is a summary of some changes made by the people behind PHP. Things marked with 💜 are done by the PHP Foundation team.

PHP 8.3 Release Page

A pull-request for the upcoming PHP 8.3 release page on php.net is in progress, and you can help with that!

This is a continuation of a good tradition started by Roman Pronskiy, Alexander Makarov, and the JetBrains design team.

Check out how these pages looked like for PHP 8.0, PHP 8.1, and PHP 8.2.

Early-developments for PHP 8.4

Although PHP 8.3 is still being ironed out, there are some discussions and even an RFC currently being voted for proposed changes in PHP 8.4 (scheduled for the end of 2024).

Declined: Support optional suffix parameter in tempnam by Athos Ribeiro

RFC proposes to add a new optional suffix parameter to the tempnam() function.

A suffix could provide even more semantic value or context for a user inspecting the generated files, and, in specific situations, could even provide more context for software processing such files. Right now, users can only add a prefix.

In Voting: Increasing the default BCrypt cost by Tim Düsterhus

The RFC proposes increasing the default BCrypt cost. This is to enhance adaptive security in relation to increased processing power and thus increased possible cracking speed.

The last time the value was updated 11 years ago. Therefore, Tim suggests updating the default cost from 10 to either 11 (double the time) or 12 (quadruple the time). The RFC and the relevant mailing list thread mention several benchmarks showing the execution time for various cost levels on different CPUs.

Under Discussion: DOM HTML5 parsing and serialization by Niels Dossche

RFC proposes to add two new classes: DOM\HTMLDocument and DOM\XMLDocument to the dom extension. Furthermore, existing dom classes in the global namespace get an alias in the new DOM namespace. The HTMLDocument class will add support for HTML5 document parsing and serializing. The XMLDocument class serves as a modern alternative to \DOMDocument, which is retained for compatibility. These new classes also provide a more misuse-resistant API for loading documents.

Under Discussion: XML_OPTION_PARSE_HUGE by Niels Dossche

RFC proposes to add a new option to the event-driven (SAX) XmlParser that would allow it to parse large documents.

Under Discussion: Add 4 new rounding modes to round() function by Jorg Sowa

RFC proposes to add four new modes to the round() function: PHP_ROUND_CEILING, PHP_ROUND_FLOOR, PHP_ROUND_AWAY_FROM_ZERO, PHP_ROUND_TOWARD_ZERO.

Under Discussion: A new JIT implementation based on IR Framework by Dmitry Stogov

RFC proposes a new JIT implementation that is based on a separately developed IR Framework. The main advantage of the new approach is that PHP source code will be freed from the low-level details of JIT compilation. The downside is a longer JIT-compilation time.

Dmitry emailed PHP Internals mailing list, which led to a lengthy discussion on the merits of the new JIT implementation.

Draft: Deprecations for PHP 8.4 RFC by Niels Dossche

RFC is currently in draft, which stands to track ideas on deprecating certain features. So far those are related to the DOMAttr::$schemaTypeInfo, DOMElement::$schemaTypeInfo properties, DOMImplementation::getFeature(), mysqli_ping(), mysqli::ping() functions, and DOM_PHP_ERR constant.

Documentation

While PHP 8.3 has moved to the RC cycle, the documentation available on php.net, requires updating. An initial version of the PHP 8.3 migration guide has been published by Yoshinari Takaoka.

Gina P. Banyard 💜 is tracking the progress for PHP 8.3 related changes in php/doc-en#2796, and also triaged issues in the docs and marked several of them as "good first time", which are ideal easy picks if you would like to start contributing to PHP docs. You can find the full list on GitHub.

Merged PRs and Commits

Following are some changes that did not go through an RFC process because they are either planned, bug fixes, or progressive enhancements.

Full list of commits since PHP Core Roundup #16

Commits are in the order they were added, grouped by author in alphabetical order.

We are incredibly grateful for the commitment and dedication of all contributors. Stay tuned for next month's roundup as we continue to make PHP better together.

Support PHP Foundation

At PHP Foundation, we support, promote, and advance the PHP language. We financially support six part-time PHP core developers to contribute to the PHP project. You can help support PHP Foundation at OpenCollective or via GitHub Sponsors.

A big thanks to all our sponsors — PHP Foundation is all of us!

Follow us on Twitter @ThePHPF to get the latest updates from the Foundation.

💜️ 🐘

PHP Roundup is prepared by Ayesh Karunaratne from PHP.Watch, a source for PHP News, Articles, Upcoming Changes, and more.

The PHP Foundation is a non-profit organization, started in 2021 by Acquia, Automattic, Craft CMS, JetBrains, Laravel, PrestaShop, Private Packagist, Symfony, Tideways, and Zend by Perforce with a mission to support, advance, and develop the PHP language.

Since April 2022, the foundation pays six developers to work on the language. See what the foundation accomplished in 2022 in the Impact and transparency report.

We are opening applications for new positions at the PHP Foundation

The PHP Foundation is almost two years old, and we are gradually introducing structure into our activities and organizing processes. We’re opening a new round of applications for developer positions. We plan to open applications every September from now on, so if you are unable to apply now, you will have another chance next year. We intend to decide on who we will hire by the end of October. If selected, you would start your work January 1st, 2024.

The application form will be open until September 30, 2023.

Apply

What are the requirements?

As before, we require previous experience in PHP core development. Ideally you should have all, but at least some of the following:

• Pull-requests / commits to php/php-src
• Experience in writing PHP extensions
• Participation in PHP mailing lists
• Contributions to other open-source projects

This time, however, we have a clearer idea of the tasks that can be engaged in and so the pool of considered candidates will be wider.

What am I going to work on?

Strategic areas we’d like you to work on:

• Security
• Performance
• Infrastructure
• Web APIs (json, PDO, streams, etc.)
• Documentation

This is not an exhaustive list, and if you would like to do something else, make sure to mention it in the form. The main criteria is a pragmatic approach. In this sense, we adhere to the position that Rasmus Lerdorf, the author of PHP, voiced back in 2014:

And rather than piling on language features with the main justification
being that other languages have them, I would love to see more focus on
practical solutions to real problems. The password_hash() addition in
5.5 is a good example of addressing a real Web problem.
…
I know these are much harder and less sexy than adding a couple
of tokens to the yacc grammar, but when we start looking at a new major
release this is what I hear from people who are running PHP in
production environments are looking for. Language features are nice, if
they are well thought out, but significant infrastructure improvements
are nicer.

https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/71525

What does working for the PHP foundation look like?

Working for the PHP Foundation offers a lot of freedom, but it also requires discipline. Your work will roughly consist of the following:

• 40% Triaging issues and fixing bugs
• 30% Working on strategic areas
• 20% Code reviews
• 10% Preparing RFCs and developing new language features

As you can see, developing new RFCs is a fairly small part of the job. Most of the work is a typical maintenance of an open source project.

We are a fully distributed team. You can work from any place* and at any time. All communication is asynchronous via GitHub, Slack, and Email. We meet for synchronous calls 1-2 times a month.

* We do not consider applications from persons residing in sanctioned territories.

Your work should be in line with the foundation’s mission statement, and we expect you to follow the code of conduct.

PHP Foundation Mission Statement

The PHP Foundation is a collective of people and organizations relying on the PHP language. Its mission is to ensure the long-term prosperity of the PHP language. The PHP Foundation focuses on providing financial support and guidance to PHP language developers to support its goals of improving the language for its users, providing high-quality maintenance, and improving the PHP language project to retain current contributors and to integrate new contributors. The PHP Foundation aims to promote the public image of the PHP language in the interest of retaining existing and gaining new users and contributors.

How to apply?

Submit your application now and we will get back to you shortly. If you have any questions or suggestions, reach out to contact@thephp.foundation.

Open submission form

The PHP Foundation is a collective of PHP contributors, veterans, and companies that collaborate to ensure the long-term sustainability of the PHP programming language. The foundation currently supports six contributors focused on PHP's maintenance, debt reduction, and feature development. These contributors work closely with others on coding, documentation, and discussions.

Started over a year ago, the PHP Core Roundup series offers a summary of the latest developments, discussions, and news about PHP Core, contributed by both PHP Foundation members and other participants. This post is the thirteenth in the PHP Core Roundup series.

PHP 8.3 Branching Out

PHP 8.3 has reached its feature-freeze, and release managers branched out the PHP-8.3 branch on August 31.

Now that PHP 8.3 is in a separate branch, the master branch will be the development source for PHP 8.4. Bug fixes and other improvements will be cherry-picked for PHP 8.3 (and older branches) as appropriate, but new features that are made to the master branch will not be merged to the PHP 8.3 branch.

Tools that build PHP based on the Git branches will also see a new branch, and the builds from the master branch will be named “PHP 8.4” for the first time.

Releases

The PHP development team released five new versions in August 2023:

PHP 8.2.10 and PHP 8.1.23

These releases include several bug fixes and improvements, notably in areas such as CLI, Date, Core, DOM, FFI, Hash, MySQLnd, Opcache, PCNTL, SPL, and Standard.

PHP 8.2.9, PHP 8.1.22, and PHP 8.0.30

All three include security fixes: GHSA-3qrf-m4j2-pcrr and GHSA-jqcx-ccgc-xwhv.

PHP 8.2.9 and PHP 8.1.22 additionally include several bug fixes and improvements, notably in areas such as Build, CLI, Core, Curl, Date, DOM, Fileinfo, FTP, GD, Intl, MBString, Opcache, PCNTL, PDO, PDO SQLite, Phar, PHPDBG, Session, Standard, Streams, SQLite3, and XMLReader.

Recent RFCs and Mailing List Discussions

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.

Hundreds of awesome PHP contributors put their efforts into improvements to the PHP code base, documentation, and the php.net website. Here is a summary of some changes made by the people behind PHP. Things marked with 💜 are done by the PHP Foundation team.

RFC Updates

In Voting: Support optional suffix parameter in tempnam by Athos Ribeiro

RFC proposes to add a new optional suffix parameter to the tempnam() function.

A suffix could provide even more semantic value or context for a user inspecting the generated files, and, in specific situations, could even provide more context for software processing such files. Right now, users can only add a prefix.

Merging postponed: PDO driver specific sub-classes by Danack

This RFC proposed to introduce driver-specific \PDO sub-classes so applications can granular declare the specific PDO drivers they support.

This RFC vote was completed and accepted unanimously, but due to the implementation complexity, the changes for this RFC were not finalized before the PHP 8.3.0RC1 release. Because PHP 8.3 is beyond its feature-freeze and now that the first release candidate is released, the consensus seems to be that this RFC will not be implemented in PHP 8.3 but on the next PHP version.

Documentation

While PHP 8.3 has moved to the RC cycle, the documentation available on php.net, requires updating.

Gina P. Banyard 💜 has triaged issues in the docs and marked several of them as "good first time", which are ideal easy picks if you would like to start contributing to PHP docs. You can find the full list on GitHub.

To make it easier to view the results of changes locally, Anna Filina has prepared a Docker Compose set-up. Check it out.

Merged PRs and Commits

Following are some changes that did not go through an RFC process because they are either planned, bug fixes, or progressive enhancements.

Full list of commits since PHP Core Roundup #15

Commits are in the order they were added, grouped by author in alphabetical order.

We are incredibly grateful for the commitment and dedication of all contributors. Stay tuned for next month's roundup as we continue to make PHP better together.

Support PHP Foundation

At PHP Foundation, we support, promote, and advance the PHP language. We financially support six part-time PHP core developers to contribute to the PHP project. You can help support PHP Foundation at OpenCollective or via GitHub Sponsors.

A big thanks to all our sponsors — PHP Foundation is all of us!

Follow us on Twitter @ThePHPF to get the latest updates from the Foundation.

💜️ 🐘

PHP Roundup is prepared by Ayesh Karunaratne from PHP.Watch, a source for PHP News, Articles, Upcoming Changes, and more.

The PHP Foundation is a collective of PHP contributors, veterans, and companies that collaborate to ensure the long-term sustainability of the PHP programming language. The foundation currently supports six contributors focused on PHP's maintenance, debt reduction, and feature development. These contributors work closely with others on coding, documentation, and discussions.

Started over a year ago, the PHP Core Roundup series offers a summary of the latest developments, discussions, and news about PHP Core, contributed by both PHP Foundation members and other participants. This post is the thirteenth in the PHP Core Roundup series.

PHP 8.3 Feature-Freeze

On July 18, PHP 8.3 branch reached its feature-freeze. As the name suggests, the list of features we plan to ship with PHP 8.3 is now frozen. Contributors who wish to make substantial changes to PHP should now target the next PHP version, PHP 8.4.

In the coming weeks, the PHP Foundation members, the PHP development team, and contributors will be making improvements to get PHP 8.3 ready for production release.

Release managers elected for PHP 8.3, Pierrick Charron, Jakub Zelenka, and Eric Mann will have the final say in case a major change must be made to the PHP 8.3.

PHP 8.3 Beta Release

The second beta release of PHP 8.3 was released this week. Now would be an ideal time to test your PHP applications on PHP 8.3.

Compiled Windows binaries are available at windows.php.net/qa, Docker images are available at Docker Hub, and source code at php/php-src repository on GitHub to compile yourself. On Homebrew, PHP 8.3.0-dev packages are available from shivammathur/php tap.

CI/CD platforms that use Docker images can use the PHP 8.2 docker images available with various base images. GitHub Actions can also make use of shivammathur/setup-php action, which supports PHP 8.3 builds.

PHP Bug Fix Releases

The PHP development team released two new versions in July 2023:

PHP 8.2.8 and PHP 8.1.21

These releases include bug fixes across various components such as CLI, Core, Curl, DOM, Opcache, OpenSSL, PGSQL, Phar, SPL, and Standard.

Recent RFCs and Mailing List Discussions

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.

Hundreds of awesome PHP contributors put their efforts into improvements to the PHP code base, documentation, and the php.net website. Here is a summary of some changes made by the people behind PHP. Things marked with 💜 are done by the PHP Foundation team.

RFC Updates

Accepted: PDO driver specific sub-classes by Danack

PHP's PDO extension supports connecting to multiple database software by using different database drivers available. Some of these drivers include MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. Although most of these database support a common set of features, all of these databases have evolved to provide additional features that PDO sometimes can support, but there is no easy way for a library to check for these capabilities without having to inspect the driver and their versions.

This RFC proposes to create driver-specific sub classes of \PDO, so libraries and applications can easily indicate the database driver they expect, and make use of IDE autocompletion and proper error handling.

The vote was unanimously accepted, and is pending implementation.

Accepted: Deprecate Functions with Overloaded Signatures by Máté Kocsis 💜

This RFC proposes to deprecate a number of functions that have overloaded signatures, meaning they behave differently based on the number or type of arguments passed to them. The goal is to make PHP's function signatures more consistent and predictable.

Implemented: Deprecations for PHP 8.3 by Gina Peter Banyard 💜, Christoph M. Becker, Máté Kocsis 💜, Tim Düsterhus, Go Kudo, Andreas Heigl

The aim is to clean up some of the older, less consistent parts of PHP to make the language more reliable and predictable. The following list provides a short overview of the functionality targeted for deprecation:

• Passing negative $widths to mb_strimwidth()
• The NumberFormatter::TYPE_CURRENCY constant
• MT_RAND_PHP
• Calling ldap_connect with 2 parameters

Implemented: Marking Overridden Methods by Tim Düsterhus

PHP 8.3 will have a new attribute #[\Override]. If this attribute is added to a method, the engine will validate that a method with the same name exists in a parent class or any of the implemented interfaces. If no such method exists, a compile time error will be emitted.

The similar concepts exist in Java, TypeScript, C++, C#, Swift, Kotlin, and other languages.

Implemented: Path to Saner Increment/Decrement operators by Gina Peter Banyard 💜

This RFC proposed several improvements to normalize the behavior of $v++ and $v-- to be the same as $v += 1 and $v -= 1, which PHP is currently inconsistent on.

It deprecates certain patterns, and introduces two new functions named str_increment and str_decrement to provide the deprecated behavior in a conscious way.

Merged PRs and Commits

Following are some changes that did not go through an RFC process because they are either planned, bug fixes, or progressive enhancements.

Full list of commits since PHP Core Roundup #14

Commits are in the order they were added, grouped by author in alphabetical order.

We are incredibly grateful for the commitment and dedication of all contributors. Stay tuned for next month's roundup as we continue to make PHP better together.

Support PHP Foundation

At PHP Foundation, we support, promote, and advance the PHP language. We financially support six part-time PHP core developers to contribute to the PHP project. You can help support PHP Foundation at OpenCollective or via GitHub Sponsors.

A big thanks to all our sponsors — PHP Foundation is all of us!

Follow us on Twitter @ThePHPF to get the latest updates from the Foundation.

💜️ 🐘

PHP Roundup is prepared by Ayesh Karunaratne from PHP.Watch, a source for PHP News, Articles, Upcoming Changes, and more.

The PHP Foundation is a collective of PHP contributors, veterans, and companies that collaborate to ensure the long-term sustainability of the PHP programming language. The foundation currently supports six contributors focused on PHP's maintenance, debt reduction, and feature development. These contributors work closely with others on coding, documentation, and discussions.

Started over a year ago, the PHP Core Roundup series offers a summary of the latest developments, discussions, and news about PHP Core, contributed by both PHP Foundation members and other participants. This post is the thirteenth in the PHP Core Roundup series.

Happy 28th birthday, PHP!

On June 8, PHP turned 28 years old! For a throwback, see Rasmus Lerdorf’s initial public announcement of PHP.

Here’s to many more years of empowering developers and pushing the boundaries of web technology. Happy Birthday, PHP! 🎉🥳🎂

PHP 8.3.0 QA Releases and Feature-freeze

The upcoming PHP 8.3 version is scheduled to be released on November 23. The newly elected PHP 8.3 release managers made the first QA releases of PHP 8.3 — PHP 8.3.0 Alpha 1 — on June 08, and the second alpha release on June 22.

These alpha versions aren't intended for production environments but are provided for testing and local development.

Compiled Windows binaries are available at windows.php.net/qa, Docker images are available at Docker Hub. For macOS, PHP 8.3.0-dev packages are available via Homebrew from shivammathur/php tap.

If you want to compile the source code yourself, you can find it on php/php-src repository on GitHub.

July 18 marks the feature-freeze for PHP 8.3. It means that all major changes to the language must be discussed and voted on prior to this date in order to make it to PHP 8.3.

Releases

The PHP development team released three new versions in June 2023:

PHP 8.2.7, PHP 8.1.20, PHP 8.0.29

All three include a security fix: GHSA-76gg-c692-v2mw. The random byte generation function used in the SOAP HTTP Digest authentication code was not checked for failure. This could result in a stack information leak.

PHP 8.2.7 and PHP 8.1.20 additionally include several bug fixes and improvements, notably in areas such as Core, Date, Exif, FPM, Hash, LibXML, MBString, Opcache, PCNTL, PGSQL, Phar, Soap, SPL, Standard, and Streams.

Recent RFCs and Mailing List Discussions

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.

Hundreds of awesome PHP contributors put their efforts into improvements to the PHP code base, documentation, and the php.net website. Here is a summary of some changes made by the people behind PHP. Things marked with 💜 are done by the PHP Foundation team.

RFC Updates

Following are the RFCs and major pull-requests discussed, voted on, and implemented since our last update.

Accepted: Marking Overridden Methods by Tim Düsterhus

PHP 8.3 will have a new attribute #[\Override]. If this attribute is added to a method, the engine will validate that a method with the same name exists in a parent class or any of the implemented interfaces. If no such method exists, a compile time error will be emitted.

The similar concepts exist in Java, TypeScript, C++, C#, Swift, Kotlin, and other languages.

Implemented: Define proper semantics for range() function by Gina Peter Banyard 💜

In the forthcoming PHP 8.3 release, the range() function will have improved behavior. It will now issue warnings or throw exceptions if it receives incompatible or unusable arguments.

Implemented: mb_str_pad() by Niels Dossche

PHP 8.3 will include a new function that works similarly to the existing str_pad() function, but with support for multibyte strings. This is a welcome addition for developers working with multibyte strings, as it will make it easier to manipulate and format these strings in PHP.

In Voting: Deprecations for PHP 8.3 by Gina Peter Banyard 💜, Christoph M. Becker, Máté Kocsis 💜, Tim Düsterhus, Go Kudo, Andreas Heigl

The aim is to clean up some of the older, less consistent parts of PHP to make the language more reliable and predictable. The following list provides a short overview of the functionality targeted for deprecation:

• Passing negative $widths to mb_strimwidth()
• The NumberFormatter::TYPE_CURRENCY constant
• Unnecessary crypt() related constants
• MT_RAND_PHP
• Global Mersenne Twister

In Voting: Deprecate Functions with Overloaded Signatures by Máté Kocsis 💜

This RFC proposes to deprecate a number of functions that have overloaded signatures, meaning they behave differently based on the number or type of arguments passed to them. The goal is to make PHP's function signatures more consistent and predictable.

Under Discussion: Closure self-reference by Danack, KapitanOczywisty

This RFC proposes to allow closures to be aliased to a variable that can be used within the closure:

<?php

$fibonacci = function (int $n) as $fn {
    if ($n === 0) return 0;
    if ($n === 1) return 1;
    return $fn($n-1) + $fn($n-2);
};

echo $fibonacci(5);

Merged PRs and Commits

Following are some changes that did not go through an RFC process because they are either planned, bug fixes, or progressive enhancements.

Full list of commits since PHP Core Roundup #13

Commits are grouped by author in random order.

We are incredibly grateful for the commitment and dedication of all contributors. Stay tuned for next month's roundup as we continue to make PHP better together.

Support PHP Foundation

At PHP Foundation, we support, promote, and advance the PHP language. We financially support six part-time PHP core developers to contribute to the PHP project. You can help support PHP Foundation at OpenCollective or via GitHub Sponsors.

A big thanks to all our sponsors — PHP Foundation is all of us!

Follow us on Twitter @ThePHPF to get the latest updates from the Foundation.

💜️ 🐘

PHP Roundup is prepared by Ayesh Karunaratne from PHP.Watch, a source for PHP News, Articles, Upcoming Changes, and more.