Derick Rethans 0:16

Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 50. Today I'm talking with Henrik come out after he reached out with a question. You might know that at the end of every podcast, I ask: if you have any questions, feel free to email me. And Henrik was the first person to actually do so within a year and a half's time. For the fun, I'm thinking that instead of I'm asking the questions, I'm letting Henrik ask the questions today, because he suggested that we should do a podcast about how the RFC process actually works. Henrik, would you please introduce yourself?

Henrik Gemal 0:52

Yeah, my name is Henrik Gemal. I live in Denmark. The CTO of dinner booking which does reservation systems for restaurants. I've been doing a PHP development for more than 10 years. But I'm not coding so much now. Now I'm managing a big team of PHP developers. And I also been involved in the the open source development of Mozilla Firefox.

Derick Rethans 1:19

So usually I prepare the questions, but in this case, Henrik has prepared the questions. So I'll hand over to him to get started with them. And I'll try to do my best to answer the questions.

Henrik Gemal 1:27

I heard a lot about these RFCs. And I was interested in the process of it. So I'm just starting right off here, who can actually do an RFC? Is it anybody on the internet?

Derick Rethans 1:38

Yeah, pretty much. In order to be able to do an RFC, what you would need is you need to have an idea. And then you need access to our wiki system to be able to actually start writing that, well not to write them, to publish it. The RFC process is open for everybody. In the last year and a half or so, some of the podcasts that I've done have been with people that have been contributing to PHP for a long time. But in other cases, it's people like yourself that have an idea, come up, work together with somebody to work on a patch, and then create an RFC out of that. And that's then goes through the whole process. And sometimes they get accepted, and sometimes they don't.

Henrik Gemal 2:16

How technical are the RFCs? Is it like coding? Or is it more like the idea in general?

Derick Rethans 2:23

The idea needs to be there, it needs to be thought out. It needs to have a good reason for why we want to add or change something in PHP. The motivation is almost as important as what the change or addition actually is about. Now, that doesn't always get us here at variable. In my opinion, but that is an important thing. Now with the idea we need to talk about what changes it has on the rest of the ecosystem, whether they are backward compatible breaks in there, how it effects extensions, or sometimes how it effects OPCache. Sometimes considerations have to be taken for that because it's, it's something quite important in the PHP ecosystem. And it is recommended that it comes with a patch, because it's often a lot easier to talk about an implementation than to talk about the idea. But that is not a necessity. There have been quite some RFCs where the idea was there. But it wasn't a patch right away yet. It is less likely that these RFCs will g

Derick Rethans 0:16

Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 51. Today I'm talking with Larry Garfield, not about an RFC for once, but about a blog post that he's written called Object Ergonomics. Larry, would you please introduce yourself?

Larry Garfield 0:38

Hello World. My name is Larry Garfield, also Crell, CRELL, on various social medias. I work at platform.sh in developer relations. We're a continuous deployment cloud hosting company. I've been writing PHP for 21 years and been a active gadfly and nudge for at least 15 of those.

Derick Rethans 1:01

In the last couple of months, we have seen quite a lot of smaller RFCs about all kinds of little features here and there, to do with making the object oriented model of PHP a little bit better. I reckon this is also the nudge behind you writing a slightly longer blog post titled "Improving PHP object ergonomics".

Larry Garfield 1:26

If by slightly longer you mean 14 pages? Yes.

Derick Rethans 1:29

Yes, exactly. Yeah, it took me a while to read through. What made you write this document?

Larry Garfield 1:34

As you said, there's been a lot of discussion around improving PHP's general user experience of working with objects in PHP. Where there's definitely room for improvement, no question. And I found a lot of these to be useful in their own right, but also very narrow and narrow in ways that solve the immediate problem but could get in the way of solving larger problems later on down the line. So I went into this with an attitude of: Okay, we can kind of piecemeal and attack certain parts of the problem space. Or we can take a step back and look at the big picture and say: Alright, here's all the pain points we have. What can we do that would solve not just this one pain point. But let us solve multiple pain points with a single change? Or these two changes together solve this other pain point as well. Or, you know, how can we do this in a way that is not going to interfere with later development that we've talked about. We know we want to do, but isn't been done yet. So how do we not paint ourselves into a corner by thinking too narrow?

Derick Rethans 2:41

It's a curious thing, because a more narrow RFC is likely easier to get accepted, because it doesn't pull in a whole set of other problems as well. But of course, as you say, if the whole idea hasn't been thought through, then some of these things might not actually end up being beneficial. Because it can be combined with some other things to directly address the problems that we're trying to solve, right?

Larry Garfield 3:07

Yeah, it comes down to what are the smallest changes we can make that taken together have the largest impact. That kind of broad picture thinking is something that is hard to do in PHP, just given the way it's structured. So I took a stab at that.

Derick Rethans 3:21

What are the main problems that we should address?

Larry Garf

The 2.9.5 release addresses a few bugs. One of them was a follow on from the issue where Xdebug would crash when another extension would run code in PHP's Request Init stage, but only on a second or later request in the same PHP process. As this is not something that's easy to catch with PHP's testing framework that Xdebug uses, this issue slipped through the cracks.

The release fixes another bug, where throwing an exception from within a destructor would crash Xdebug. The fix for this was merely making sure that PHP's internal state is still available:

- if (!(ZEND_CALL_INFO(EG(current_execute_data)) & ZEND_CALL_HAS_SYMBOL_TABLE)) {
+ if (EG(current_execute_data) && !(ZEND_CALL_INFO(EG(current_execute_data)) & ZEND_CALL_HAS_SYMBOL_TABLE)) {

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Derick Rethans 0:16

Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 52. Today I'm talking with George Banyard about an RFC that he's made together with Mate Kocsis. This RFC is titled locale independent floats to string. Hello, George, would you please introduce yourself?

George Banyard 0:39

Hello, I'm George Peter Banyard. I'm a student at Imperial College and I work on PHP in my free time.

Derick Rethans 0:47

All right, so we're talking about local independent floats. What is the problem here?

George Banyard 0:52

Currently when you do a float to string conversion, so all casting or displaying a float, the conversion will depend on like the current local. So instead of always using like the decimal dot separator. For example, if you have like a German or the French locale enabled, it will use like a comma to separate like the decimals.

Derick Rethans 1:14

Okay, I can understand that that could be a bit confusing. What are these locales exactly?

George Banyard 1:20

So locales, which are more or less C locales, which PHP exposes to user land is a way how to change a bunch of rules on how string and like stuff gets displayed on the C level. One of the issues with it is that like it's global. For example, if you use like a thread safe API, if you use the thread safe PHP version, then set_locale() is not thread safe, so we'll just like impact other threads where you're using it.

Derick Rethans 1:50

So a locale is a set of rules to format specific things with floating point numbers being one of them in which situations does the locale influence the display a floating point numbers in every situation in PHP or only in some?

George Banyard 2:06

Yes, it only impacts like certain aspects, which is quite surprising. So a string cast will affect it the strval() function, vardump(), and debug_zval_dump() will all affect the decimal locator and also printf() with the percentage lowercase F, but that's expected because it's locale aware compared to the capital F modifier.

Derick Rethans 2:32

But it doesn't, for example, have the same problem in the serialised function or say var_export().

George Banyard 2:37

Yeah, and json_encode() also doesn't do that. PDO has special code which handles also this so that like all the PDO drivers get like a constant treat like float string, because that could like impact on the databases.

Derick Rethans 2:53

How is it a problem that with some locales enabled and then uses a comma instead of the decimal point. How can this cause bugs and PHP applications?