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Date: Tue, 10 May 2011 14:43:12 +0300
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To: internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] 5.4 again
From: arvids.godjuks@gmail.com (Arvids Godjuks)

Hello Internals!

Here is a point of view from an active user land developer on PHP
development and feature requests and the politics going on in
internals.

Right now I think PHP has reached a milestone, where it is a need to
take a break from large feature developing, witch takes a lot of time
and effort, and do the cleanup stuff - bugs, accepted and unfinished
features, make enhancement on existing stuff and clean up the code.
New features should still come in, but the focus really should be to
make a cleanup. I have observed over 3-4 years now some good RFC's
that had been just forgotten, despite the fact that they were welcomed
and work has been done. For example:

The Tainted Variable RFC - https://wiki.php.net/rfc/taint - personally
I would prefer that feature right now over any new feature, because it
gives the ability to check for insecure variable handling and make
sure you don't miss something. A major security enhancement on the
language level (how the people can and will abuse it is not the issue
- people do SQL selects in loops - tainted variable abuse is just
negligent compared to that one) - isn't it worth the effort to finish
that and release?

The Lemon parser - https://wiki.php.net/rfc/lemon - I remember a lot
of discussions on that and work being done and people wanting to do
it. What happened?

Error handling RFC's - https://wiki.php.net/rfc/error-optimizations
and https://wiki.php.net/rfc/enhanced_error_handling - it's sitting
there for quite some time. Any thought on that? Because error handling
improvements will benifit all PHP developers - every single PHP
developer out there in the wild.

PHP Native Interface - https://wiki.php.net/rfc/php_native_interface -
sounds and looks like a good and important project.

And I even will not touch the topic of type hints and return type
hints. At least param type hinting should be dealt with and done
something about it, because right now it's at a half-completed state -
only arrays and objects are supported.

And probably the RFC wiki should be looked at and sorted out - there
are some things implemented and rejected, witch haven't been moved to
proper sections.


Said all that - I think annotations should be dropped for 5.4 for now
and the development and refining continued until it's properly
scrutinized, tested and ironed out. Right now to focus on delivering
stuff that's all ready done or near completed (performance
improvements for example) and look at the backlog and bugs.

Arvids.