Finally, after nearly a year of work, it's into a release. Some new stuff has sneaked into it undocumented, that people might find interesting - apc.preload_path would be one of them. The backend memory allocation has been re-done - the api part by me and the internals by shire. There's a hell of a lot of new code in there, both rewritten and added. Tons of php4 cruft removed, php5 stuff optimized, made more stable, then less stable, made faster, then applied brakes. Made leak-proof, quake-proof and in general, idiot-proof. So, on & so forth.

To show the difference, he includes a diff of the current version against the previous - 68 files changed, 3255 insertions and 5545 deletions.

Wow, after what feels like ages PHP 5.3.0alpha3 was just released. Originally we hoped to be able to release now intermediate releases every 2-3 weeks, this one took a good 2 months. Somehow this releases did its very best to stall itself. People that needed to work on things together by chance ended up being busy with other things and vacations in just the right order to make things impossible. Most of this was to be attributed to the namespace discussions, which climaxed in the backslash FUD campaign.

He notes that a stable release is probably looking good in Q1 of 2009 (with namespaces being the delaying factor). He also suggests something that could help make things a bit simpler in the future - making the internals@ mailing list read-only for anyone outside of core developers. A good bit of the confusion and bickering came from those outside the dev team and it didn't help the group come to a decision any earlier.

You can find the official release information for the alpha2 on the main PHP.net website.

Operator overloading is a programming language features that allows operators to act differently depending on the type of data they are operating on. Since OOP lets us create custom types (classes), there are plenty of opportunities to do useful and interesting code manipulations using operator overloading.

He talks about magic functions, the additions that the SPL made, the PECL addition operator and how much its currently being discussed on the PHP internals list.

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The position requires a good knowledge of C, extensive experience with PHP (obviously), good interpersonal skills, and a BS/MS degree in computer science or engineering is preferred. You can find the rest of the requirements in the entry on their site.

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She explains how a simple string (an echo statement) is interpreted into a simple compilation structure. Her next step, though (placing a variable inside a string) yields something that seems more complex than it should be. A concatination example simplifies things down a bit, but, oddly enough, it gets even better when a comma is used instead of a period to concatinate. She also gives an example of a heredoc statement that doesn't conform to the interpolation standards you'd think.

Why does this happen? Because there are about a dozen ways that a variable can be hidden inside an interpolated string. Similarly, when looking for a heredoc end-token, the token can be an arbitrary length, containing any of the label characters, and may or may not sit on a line by itself. Put simply, it's too difficult to encompass in one regular expression.

She specifically mentions the APC caching system and its built-in optimizer to help with some of these issues. It pulls the interpolations back down to a size they should be and anticipating operations by pre-resolving things like constants and scalar expressions.

Of course, not everyone can install this pacakge, so she suggests an alternative:

You can still avoid 90% of the INIT_STRING/ADD_STRING dilema by simply using single quotes and concatenation (or commas when dealing with echo statements). It's a simple trick and one which shouldn't harm maintainability too much, but on a large, complicated script, you just might see an extra request or two per second.

You can check out the details here or just download the files directly from here

As many have noticed 5.1.0 had some issue when it was released, like for starters it introduced a empty date class by default which effectively killed scripts that used PEAR::Date.

As one can see in this excellent rant by Ilia there are different views on how this should have been handled (also read the internals ML if you need even more reading material), namely why PEAR was polluting generic names and why they didn't fix it right away so PHP could get the glorious name of Date.

Heigl takes the side of the internals developers, that internal PHP should win out over PEAR on this issue. There's been a pretty large debate raging on about this one - and, even with the (pullback) release of PHP 5.1.1, it goes on as an issue to address in, say, PHP 5.2? (Or maybe they'll just wait until 6 and lump it all in...)]]> Wed, 30 Nov 2005 07:38:56 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4399 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4399 this new post from Andrei Zmievski's blog today, he has a bit of a reminder for anyone out there participating in the php-internals mailing list - "don't forget to participate".

The latest round of discussions on the php-internals mailing list highlights something that has been a pet peeve of mine for a long time. As PHP became more and more popular, the number of people subscribed to the mailing list has grown as well, and lately this has resulted in a slew of interminable threads of will-crushing length.

A whole lot of these folks are under the impression that one can simply subscribe to the list, read discussions while lurking or semi-lurking, and start to vote on things that affect intimate parts of the language. That is... kind of gall-ish, if you ask me.

His recommendation so that you will be taken seriously (and have your opinion count) on the list? Participate - good, valid, throughtful participation - that contributes a full and complete thought to the conversation on the list. And no, "+2 for namespaces" doesn't count...]]> Wed, 30 Nov 2005 07:06:22 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4381 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4381 John Lim looks at the release of PHP 5.1 with a bit more skeptical eye in his latest blog post today.

Well PHP 5.1.0 is out. This is a monumental piece of work, and congratulations to the PHP 5 internals team for all the hard work. However it feels rushed through the door. Apparently there are compatibility problems (with typecasting when parameter passing, the prototype date class, and possibly other stuff.) Wait for the patches.

He also mentions some of the turmoil that's been going on on the PHP internals mailing list lately, especially pre-5.1 release...]]> Mon, 28 Nov 2005 05:50:01 -0600