PHP-2006: A look back

Well, Davey Shafik started us off with his year-end wrapup so I'll follow suit with mine. The thoughts below are mine and mildly influenced by alcohol. They represent a foggy review of how I experienced the year through the imperfect recollection of mailing list archives.

January began with releases of 4.4.2 and 5.1.2. Version 5.1.2 was especially close to my heart since it was the first version to ship an extension of mine not only bundled, but enabled by default. I've had my hands in most of the PHP runtime, but this was the first time I could point at a standard extension and say that it was basicly my work (Note: Mike Wallner did a fair bit of work adding to the number of hash algorithms supported, don't let me discount his efforts). Tim Starling wrote to ask why PHP4 refcounts are 16bit, and what he could do about getting that counter increased in future versions of PHP4. Since such a change would break binary compatability and since the PHP4 branch is already quite dead, the request was ultimately left alone with an admonishment to "not do that".

A few other requests were broached or continued, such as support for Friend Classes, Named Arguments, and Naming Arguments (The last of which would eventually be implemented). It was also this month in which Rasmus suggested adding JSON to the standard distribution, this quietly morphed into votes for including filter; Both were eventually linked in. James Crane had the idea that Array Literals in PHP could use sprucing up, meanwhile Sean Coates planted the seed for what would become the PHP6 Unicode Progress tracker.

February came in fairly quiet, mostly wrapping up the topics from January. Appearantly Steph didn't like the quiet and decided to stir up the hornet's nest with some four letter words cleverly disguised under the heading of True Labeled Breaks. For those who have blocked out 2005, this was easily one of the longest threads of that year and this resumption promised to be just as bad. By March, this thread would finnally be brought to a halt as the functionality was slipped quietly into the engine. I did not see that coming...

Amidst this unexpected addition, others were busily pulling things out, with Andi slashing away at safe_mode in HEAD, and Marcus integrating support for function deprecation into the 5.2 branch.

March came in like a lion with Marcus poking the list about Late Static Binding with less argument about Why, and a healthy focus on How. Johannes Schlueter made a very pragmatic and uncontroversial suggestion to change the internal symbol prefix applied to methods in order to distinguish them from functions. Pierre ran with some PDM recommendations shouting Adieu register_globals and Adieu a la magie. Sebastian Bergmann was frustrated with trying to apply streams filters to include and require, until I pointed him at the php://filter wrapper. Though this met his need, he made a strong case for being able to set an automatic filter to be applied to all streams. I promised to do this after streams in HEAD had been cleaned up, and while I've gotten streams where I want them, I still havn't fullfilled his feature request... Shame on me.

All this time, the GOTO debate was still raging and similar types of language altering features were being put on the table. Finally, Zeev decided he'd had enough calling for people to "Give the language a rest". This managed to have a decent effect which Rasmus soon channeled into his call for performance geeks to narrow the performance gap between 4.4 and 5.1. Towards the end of the month, I suggested adding an open_basedir_for_include directive. While there was some interrest for this, Ilia quickly convinced me that my approach to the problem was flawed and wouldn't give any real benefit.

April showered the internals list with Round 2 of the Late Static Binding discussion, and Thomas Boutell's anouncement that he'd be turning over primary development of the GD library to the PHP project, spearheaded by Pierre. I made some more noise complaining of RETURN_RT_STRING() (and family)'s leakage of memory under certain not-uncommon conditions, while Nuno brought the infamous Coverity Report to attention.

Richard Lynch shared his WTF concerning the oft misunderstood tsrm_ls parameter in PHP's sources. Sadly, I hadn't written my summary of the topic yet, but although noone gave him a detailed description (It's a bit long to go into in an email), several helpful links were supplied. Round about the middle of the month, Rasmus announced PHP's eminent participation in the Google Summer of Code project (wait, don't you work for Yahoo!?). After signing up as a mentor (though I never actually mented -- is that a word?), I gathered up my materials and flew off to php|tek 2006 in Orlando.

May opened to the initial planning rounds for PHP 5.2.0, and the resumption of the ifsetor() request, now dressed up as coalesce(). By the way, why havn't we embraced this feature request yet? About a week into the month, Ilia branched the PHP_5 tree leaving room for the earnest development of 5.2.

William Candillon wrote in to request a PHP version of C's #line macro, but was drowned out by the roar of Derick's plea to "Stop breaking our apps for the sake of OO". Once the din of that had quieted down a little, Jason Garber decided to ask about making it possible to mark properties as read only. In case anyone was curious, none of these proposals gained footing.

June now, and my book is finally released bringing with it an invitation to appear on php|architect's Pro::PHP podcast. Marcus Boerger suggested that array indices could benefit from implicit __toString() calls, but he was eventually shot down. Dimitry's suggestion however, which provided for automatic module global registration via the module entry, did receive a warm welcome and you'll see it if you look inside PHP 5.2.0.

Clearly this was the month of bright ideas, because Nuno Lopes tossed in gcc branch prediction. It got a warm initial reception from the engine folk including Zeev stating "I actually like how it makes the code more readable hinting which branches are rare.". Andi agreed that it was a nice idea, but brought in the sobering reality that it didn't really do much for performance and could potentially bring unexpected results if applied heavily.

July was a busy month for me as I changed jobs for the first time in over six years. I'm loving the new job by the way. Fantastic coworkers and....interresting challenges.... Laupretre François thought it'd be a good idea to extend include_path to support stream wrappers. Those of us who know what trouble include_path already causes for performance and security were quick to nix that particular idea; Short version: No.

Marcus popped in mid-month with an implementation of the #line directive suggested back in May. Still no love from the internals community at large though; Short version: no #line for you. Dmitry committed a large patch to the Zend Engine to change how non-persistent memory is allocated and freed within a request. The good news is that emallocs are now faster, the bad news is that a hack I'd made in PHP5.1 for manipulating the non-persistent memory pool no longer worked...Grrrr.....

On July 27th, Jani said Good-Bye.

August picked up Mike Wallner's July post decrying the state of OO strictness building up in PHP. This maelstrom took up most of the first week with no real conclusion (at least, not a satisfactory one). A different Mike made some more noise later in the month asking why accessing non-existant functions/methods has to be so darned fatal. The good news is that they aren't so much anymore. Yay for E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR.

September brought a landslide of movement in the PHP6 function migration/review process. There was some degree of question as to whether unicode.semantics should be SYSTEM, PERDIR, or USER. Noone really considered the latter as a possibility as it wrecks way too many assumptions, but the SYSTEM/PERDIR debate raged for awhile with the idealists wanting PERDIR support to aid migration, and the realists clinging to the maintainable simplicity of SYSTEM. In the end, SYSTEM won.

October was a relatively slow month, leading up to conference season such as it was. Midmonth sometime I tossed out the idea of allowing open_basedir to be tightened (but not loosened) during runtime and it was green-lighted surprisingly quietly. Ilia got a little frustrated with the mounting delays holding back the release of PHP 5.2.0 which was already way behind schedule. Tragicly, this plea made the delay last even longer. Finally at the end of the month, he rolled final.

November was a big conference month for me. First I crashed the nearby ZendCon, then turned right around and flew off to Germany for the International PHP Conference. Sean poked the namespaces topic with a sharp stick and managed to generate a week's worth of noise resulting in no actual commitments by any capable/interrested parties. No sooner had that comotion died down than did Antony Dovgal bemoan a regression in fgets()'s behavior which I introduced in HEAD. I still think it's a silly behavior for a userspace function, but BCs are BCs, so the regression's been reverted.

December's most exciting event was a debaucle over the backward/forward compatability of serialize given the additional escaping concerns that processing unicode strings imposes. Ilia brought forward a proposal to finally remove the unnecessary COM/Sockets/MHash extensions from the distribution bundle. After some light debate it was decided to keep COM around and only nix Sockets and MHash as of PHP6 (possibly 5.3 if such a version comes about). Wietse Venema brought back the concept of introducing a taint mode for PHP. The topic is still being discussed, but things don't look good for Wietse...

And now here we are, at year's end. PHP6's unicode function migration process has passed the 50% mark and a preview release is sure to come once we handle a couple more extensions. PHP 5.2 is grabbing hold amongst the serious PHP shops, and even web hosters are trickling away from PHP4. There's still a huge, bright future ahead for this language, together we can make it happen.

¡Feliz Año Nuevo!