The PHP 7 Revolution: Return Types and Removed Artifacts

With the planned date for PHP 7’s release rapidly approaching, the internals group is hard at work trying to fix our beloved language as much as possible by both removing artifacts and adding some long desired features. There are many RFCs we could study and discuss, but in this post, I’d like to focus on three that grabbed my attention.

PHP 5.7 vs PHP 7

As I mentioned in the last newsletter, 5.7 has been downvoted in favor of moving directly to PHP 7. This means there will be no new version between 5.6 and 7 - even if the new version was only to serve as a warning light to those still stuck on outdated code. Originally, 5.7 was not supposed to have new features, but was supposed to throw out notices and warnings of deprecation about code that’s about to change in v7.

It would also warn about some keywords that are to be reserved in PHP 7, so that people can bring their code up to speed with a sort of “automatic” compatibility checker in the form of an entire PHP version. The thing is, however, as I argue in the newsletter, that most people technologically competent enough to follow PHP in its upgrade path by keeping up with the most recent version aren’t generally the type of people to actually be using code that might break in PHP 7.

While this is a good discussion to have, what’s done is done and the voting is over. What do you think about this?

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by Bruno Skvorc via SitePoint