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To: Maxime Veber <nek.dev@gmail.com>
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Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 02:05:52 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP6 thoughts about Engine changes
From: johannes@schlueters.de (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

On Wed, 2014-03-05 at 21:59 +0100, Maxime Veber wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I totally love the ideas about BC and cleaning everything. That's what PHP
> need and deserve.

I assume you are talking about userspae APIs, the often quoted needle vs
haystack etc. If people think this is needed it is trivial to provide
aliases and "fixed" versions for these from an extension (and/or
userspace lib). As nobody has I assume that's more talk than need and
people got accustomed easily.

> Can you be more specific about what you want to change in "Cleanup API and
> dead code" part ?

The mail was about API implementation where there are grown APIs where
parts might not be needed anymore.

> And na na, it's not only for an hypotetic php7 version. We change things or
> we do not change !
> After all, php move great with minor releases... !

There are two requirements

      * people who do
      * thought about backwards compatibility

The first item is hard, the number of people actually doing cleanup
tasks is a small fraction of our relatively small contributor base. So
going by Julien's list, the expected timeframe and the available work
power doing all those things is almost impossible.

Secondly, breaking too much at once is not an option. "Compatibility is
a feature". for one there is lots of legacy code and knowledge, secondly
it tells users that they can invest in PHP and won't get too much update
pain later. See also the "success" of either Python 3 or Perl 6 which
"fixed" too many things giving them low adoption. This by no means we
shouldn't fix and improve things but that's a continuous process. (my
favorite example: register_globals took literally 10 years from us
starting to promote alternatives till we removed the option)


> If we want to change, let's to what have to be done *now* !

We are in constant change. There is barely a language as commonly used
as PHP which changes so rapidly.

johannes