As this post to Laravel News mentions the upcoming v5.6 release of the framework will remove the artisan optimize functionality from the project's artisan command line tool.

The Artisan optimize command is deprecated as of 5.5, and a commit in master has already removed it from 5.6. Waiting until 5.6 gives you time to update your build scripts and composer.json files ahead of the release.

As of Laravel 5.5, the composer.json no longer references optimize in the post-install-cmd and post-update-cmd scripts. The Optimize command is still defined, but does nothing in 5.5.

The project has provided some reasoning behind the change, mostly having to do with the overall performance improvements in the PHP language itself. Additionally, there was some discussion around the removal before it was finalized.

As pointed out by Ligaya Turmelle in this blog post today, it seems that safe_mode in PHP is officially "gone".

From this Zend Weekly Summary:

Following the Paris PDM recommendations, and (unusually) with the approval of the entire spectrum of PHP developers and users, Andi went to work on removing safe_mode from CVS HEAD this week. He got as far as the streams code before he hit a problem, and wrote to Sara (for help).

Sara agreed that it was in fact a bug, and admitted that she'd probably introduced this 'slight logic twist' when routing unlink() to use stream wrappers.

Andi thanked Sara for her analysis and asked her to keep an eye on his commits to ensure he didn't apply a wrong fix in the stream wrapper code. She did; he didn't. Andi went on to clean all trace of the safe_mode implementation from the rest of the PHP core and most of the core extensions, ably assisted by Ilia.

One of the longest-lingering, painful issues that PHP has had to deal with in the past has finally been laid to rest. Here's to a positive step forward to PHP6!

As pointed out by Ligaya Turmelle in this blog post today, it seems that safe_mode in PHP is officially "gone".

From this Zend Weekly Summary:

Following the Paris PDM recommendations, and (unusually) with the approval of the entire spectrum of PHP developers and users, Andi went to work on removing safe_mode from CVS HEAD this week. He got as far as the streams code before he hit a problem, and wrote to Sara (for help).

Sara agreed that it was in fact a bug, and admitted that she'd probably introduced this 'slight logic twist' when routing unlink() to use stream wrappers.

Andi thanked Sara for her analysis and asked her to keep an eye on his commits to ensure he didn't apply a wrong fix in the stream wrapper code. She did; he didn't. Andi went on to clean all trace of the safe_mode implementation from the rest of the PHP core and most of the core extensions, ably assisted by Ilia.

One of the longest-lingering, painful issues that PHP has had to deal with in the past has finally been laid to rest. Here's to a positive step forward to PHP6!