PHP 7

Stockholm January 2015, view from the office.

The other data I found and read the PHP RFC, these includes changes already made for PHP 7, the next major version of PHP. There is no really exciting things for me. My use of PHP is very unusual, I use PHP mostly for shell scripting and an interpreter for my Integration Tag Language, the latter use is probably the most awkward use of PHP imaginable. My biggest concern for every new major version of PHP will the SAP RFC extensions work, SAPNWRFC and SAPRFC, for PHP 7 I’m sure some tinkering will be needed.

My own wishes for PHP are better ways of parse and execute PHP code dynamically, eval is what I use and I just don’t get my head around that instruction, it is trial&error sessions each time I use it. Better parallel execution would be nice, i.e. simpler parallel invoking as it is today it’s fairly complex to fork children or sub-tasks in your PHP code and communicate between them. Tail call optimization is a feature I would like to see in PHP, since it allows for more efficient recursion code and I like recursions.

PHP Deprecated:  iconv_set_encoding(): Use of iconv.input_encoding is deprecated in scriptC1.php on line 49

If all deprecated code is removed from PHP 7 I have some work to do, especially UTF-8 related code. I’m in favour of removing deprecated code, let it live over two major versions then remove it. I chosed PHP for my Data Warehouse project not because it was the best or most stable language, but because it was new and there was a vibrant community pushing  the language forward, PHP looked fun. If removal of deprecated code mean simpler maintenance and a lower footprint of PHP I do not mind doing some extra work, which will make my code better in the end. You just cannot add new stuff, obsolete code should go away.