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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] hints and constraints
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

Lester Caine wrote on 05/02/2015 12:33:
> On 05/02/15 11:37, Andrea Faulds wrote:
>> The current description isn’t totally inaccurate, but I had considered renaming the RFC since “big integer support” implies we don’t already have support for big integers, though we do in the form of ext/gmp. A better title for the RFC might be “make PHP integer type be arbitrary-precision”. Still, it’s a minor issue at best.
> Current integer variable has a constrained value. 64bit 'fixes' have
> created a new set of rules to go with that.

There is nothing new about PHP's userland int type being 64-bit on 
64-bit platforms. For instance, raising 2 to the power of 62 returns 
exactly the same thing on every version of PHP back to 4.3.0: 
http://3v4l.org/VBMbv


>> That code is also broken on 64-bit platforms, and has been for a decade. Actually, longer: x86 wasn’t the first architecture to support 64-bit, but it supporting it certainly increased the prominence of 64-bit computing.
> Broken in a way that was managable, but it is only in the last few years
> that windows itself has become 64bit although 32bit builds are still
> required in a number of marketplaces since 64bit ones don't work.
> That the transition has not been handled well applies everywhere!

The classic use of PHP is the LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. 
Linux distributions have had good support for 64-bit architectures for 
years, so many, probably most, production installations of PHP are 
64-bit builds.