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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Ruminations on PHP 5++
From: rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf)

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PHP is and should remain:

1) a pragmatic web-focused language
2) a loosely typed language
3) a language which caters to the skill-levels and platforms of a wide
range of users

The web is not typed. If we are going to expand the type checking we
have to respect type coercion. If people can no longer do:

   age_check($_POST['age'])

because age_check is defined as:

   function age_check(int $age) { }

then we have a problem. This is why PHP doesn't have type checks for
coercible types, of course. Many suggestions I have seen so far use the
friendly-sounding "type hint" term to introduce strict typing. They
aren't hints at all in those implementations. It doesn't mean we can't
do something here, but it has to be done very carefully.

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.

PDO could use some attention. For example, I've been looking at
PDO-mysqlnd and mysqli-mysqlnd and trying to get them to share the
underlying mysqlnd connection. Why? Because PDO has a very nice
client-side prepare implementation which saves 2 network roundtrips per
query over doing them server-side. But, at the same time mysqli has some
very nice low-level features people would love to have access to. Being
able to export the underlying PDO connection to the native API across
all the drivers would be a significant improvement.

Performance is always interesting. There are plenty of places where we
can get some performance wins, especially through tighter integration
with opcache.

Unicode Unicode Unicode.

And yes, 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.

-Rasmus


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