I came across this post on Reddit asking what people would like to see in the next PHP: https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/s/l9r8UJP6Rk
There are two major proposals I would make, both of which aim to greatly improve PHP's competitiveness and ecosystem, while maintaining its spirit and what makes it great. And one minor proposal. I wrote them on Reddit, but then I realized I should actually do something about it. The last time I did something was in 2015 writing to the PHP list back then. How do I get rights to create my own RFCs for these? I tried to do it on the web, but it says to ask on the mailing list. Here are my bona fides: I've spent about 20 years with PHP, to be honest, and the last 14 building an open-source community platform / CMS that competes with Facebook, Twitter, etc. and uses very idiomatic PHP. Here are two links in case anyone is interested https://github.com/Qbix https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ Anyway without further ado, I would like to present the two proposals: First one: introduce switch_global_context($name) ============ I really love PHP’s shared-nothing architecture, but when it comes to frankenphp, swoole etc. it is very hard to port existing apps to that evented runtime. That is mainly because the superglobals and static variables are — well — global. You can have the best of both worlds. Just add a function to PHP which can do context switching between all global scopes, to any named scope. So when you have one evented runtime, it can quickly switch. This should be easy to do with SHM (shared memory segments) and just pointing to a different page in memory. The goal is to allow all “legacy” code (ie all current PHP code that runs on php-fpm etc) to be trivially ported to much faster runtimes, while remaining “shared-nothing” for all intents and purposes (global contexts would be isolated from one another because only one could be active at a time). Second one: set_encryption_seed($name) You might need to let people register functions to run before a context is saved (sleep) and after it is loaded (wakeup), when there is memory pressure, PHP can handle this in a standard way and even encrypt it at rest. You can also do this for session save/open handlers (which you already do). Just have an environment variable or function like set_encryption_seed($seed) at startup of frankenphp or swoole. Third one one: Improve func_get_args to return associative arrays. =================== I had this suggestion back in 2015 but maybe now it’s outdated. You see, functions typically start out having required arguments first, then add on optional arguments later. I thought based on how PHP passes arguments, it would have been trivial to enhance func_get_args to return an array indexed not just by numeric values but also string values! And therefore one could pass arguments like in python: func(2, 5, $foo => $bar, $baz => $choo) It also would look exactly like the familiar array composition syntax. But this is no mere syntactic sugar. It helps developers fall into the pit of success by creating backward-compatible interfaces and making any function extensible, improving the entire ecosystem. Sincerely, Greg Magarshak <https://76183cf5.streaklinks.com/ChUGGA0vb2UyLmRu_AoCdl6f/http%3A%2F%2Fqbix.com%2Finvest> ᐧ ᐧ
