Re: Ruminations on PHP 5++

From: Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2014 16:50:28 +0000
Subject: Re: Ruminations on PHP 5++
References: 1 2 3 4  Groups: php.internals 
Request: Send a blank email to [email protected] to get a copy of this message 
On 1/24/14 10:31 AM, Julien Pauli wrote:

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 5:18 PM, Andrea Faulds <[email protected]> wrote:



On 24/01/14 16:18, Lester Caine wrote:


Adam Harvey wrote:


Adam, who loves starting a good flame war on a Friday.


It would perhaps be nice to avoid the same mistakes that Python made
when re-factoring 3.0 and not taking the rest of the user base with
them. The level of breaking of BC needs to be carefully balanced?
And I still think that 5.4 should have been a major hike which would
have allowed a little more flexibility then.



There is a lot that PHP's 5/6 transition can learn from Python's 2/3
transition. One might be, IMO, not to backport any new features. Otherwise
people will simply keep using 2/5 instead of 3/6, due to the features also
being available there.


Big +1 , Python 2 to 3 should be taken care of when thinking about PHP5++.

Also, we should remember what we actually did from PHP4 to PHP5.
We changed the objects management (that was the biggest change), and
even with a compatibility mode INI settings which was pretty hard to
develop from an internal POV, it still took AGES for people to migrate
from 4 to 5, mainly because of "compatibility issues" regarding
objects, and because of the new error reporting system showing much
more messages on badly designed code in PHP5 than it did in PHP4.

I wasnt an internal guy at this time, but I still remember 2004 pain.
Everybody felt enthusiast , PHP 5.0 was a pretty nice product , but it
took about 5 to 7 years to finally jump to 5.X branch :-p
Times have changed, PHP and all its ecosystem is nowadays more mature
than before, but still...

We must not do any mistake for PHP6 , nobody will pardon a mistake.
Every wrong step or decision could lead to PHP's death , we really
have to take care of everything.

Julien


Coordinating with user-space projects will be critical to avoiding that same chicken-and-egg problem.  It took 100+ projects banding together to declare "we're mad as hell, and don't give a crap about PHP 4 anymore" to finally make that transition happen, and that was 3 years after PHP 5.0 was released.  If we want PHP 5++ to have an easier transition period (yes please!), we need to coordinate that with major projects and frameworks to make sure that they 1) Can up their requirements in a reasonable timeframe; 2) Have a good reason to do so; 3) Can all do so around the same time so that there's no "first mover penalty".

That sounds like a good topic for FIG to help with, and I'm happy to act as a coordinator between Internals and FIG around that.

I also agree with others who've said that PHP 5++ is the right time to heavily refactor/rewrite the engine itself, just as was done for PHP 5.  Its also a place that leaning on HHVM (either for code, or concepts, or something) would be very valuable.

--Larry Garfield

Thread (34 messages)

« previous php.internals (#71519) next »