The Present and Future of PHP

2018. Máté Kocsis

But let's first talk about...

PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdolf in 1994

Initially, PHP was only a

it then led to weird inconsistencies we all know

PHP ended up being:

• general purpose

• dynamic typed

• shared nothing architecture

• procedural and object oriented

• slow

• unsafe

• inconvenient

PHP 7.x

Vastly improved type safety

• Scalar type declarations

• Return type declarations

Improved performance by 1.5+ times

Memory-related optimizations

• https://nikic.github.io/2014/12/22/PHPs-new-hashtable-implementation.html
• https://nikic.github.io/2015/05/05/Internal-value-representation-in-PHP-7-part-1.html
• https://nikic.github.io/2015/06/19/Internal-value-representation-in-PHP-7-part-2.html

Initial JIT support

http://biagiocosenza.com/papers/PopovCC17.pdf

What will PHP 7.4 look like?

🎉 Typed Properties RFC 🎉

🎉 Preloading 🎉

Paves the road for PHP 8 via deprecations

So what about PHP 8?

Should be the next release after PHP 7.4

JIT is no longer the first priority

Better support for long-running, async execution

Foreign Function Interface support

https://externals.io/message/102415

Other features PHPeople want

Scalar objects

https://nikic.github.io/2014/03/14/Methods-on-primitive-types-in-PHP.html

https://twitter.com/kocsismate90/status/1019113915781926912

What do you want?

http://zsuraski.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-future-of-zend-engine-and-zend.html​

https://twitter.com/nikita_ppv/status/1054382823761682433

PHP is going to be cool!