What to Look For in PHP 5.4

http://jburrows.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/what-to-look-for-in-php-5-4-0/

by robmorgan • 15 years ago

86 60 15 years ago

jburrows.wordpress.com

nixle• 15 years ago

Nice to read something constructive and informative besides all the hate PHP has been getting lately.

What do you mean lately? PHP has gotten tons of well deserved criticism since it was created. It isn't "hate" to point out that a popular language is much worse than many other comparable languages.

maratd4• 15 years ago

When that "well deserved criticism" comes from the same people who feel compelled to post in every PHP thread, obsessively, over and over again ... it's hate.

Hate isn't inherently negative. You can hate evil, etc.

However, if you hate a programming language ... there's really something wrong with you. It suggests a very sheltered life. There are far more important things in life that deserve your hatred.

rickmb• 15 years ago

It becomes "hate" when the criticism is ill-informed and largely irrelevant. The bits of PHP that are "much worse" are mostly either legacy cruft that nobody in their right mind uses anymore, or bits are rarely touched in day to day programming but are safely wrapped in frameworks, ORM's, libraries etcetera.

Beyond that, PHP simply isn't particularly elegant (mostly since it was never really designed to be a programming language), and we all know it.

Other than that, I rarely see any relevant criticism, let alone constructive criticism.

DonnyV4• 15 years ago

I'v been thinking about using Php lately. I come from a C# background, so I was poking around to see what I would be missing or gaining from Php. Why haven't they added a compiled option yet? I know you can use http://phpcompiler.org compiler to do it but why hasn't it just been added to the project? The speed increase is well worth it. Also I noticed Php doesn't have generics or Template classes. I use these a lot in my C# libraries. Anyone know if thats going to be added anytime soon? I do like that its used everywhere. Also looking for a good MVC framework for Php like Asp.net MVC.

UPDATE Can you please stop down voting. I'm not hating on Php, read my other comments below.

darklajid• 15 years ago

Didn't downvote you, but

1) You're hijacking the thread with something unrelated and better suited for some online research or sites like SO

2) According to your questions you're not investigating PHP, you're looking for C# in disguise/in another set of clothes.

DonnyV4• 15 years ago

Yeah your probably right about asking this here. I was hoping for some Php experts maybe to point me in the right direction. I'm not trying to hate on Php just want to learn an open source framework or language that has similar features to C#. I really don't want to learn Java because I think thats a dead language. I'd rather use Mono but they don't have very good support for asp.net mvc.

phpnode2• 15 years ago

I too wish php had a widely supported compiler, but in reality it's not something that most projects require. The overhead of interpreting php is a lot lower than e.g. making a single db call. Also, in the most common usage scenarios, PHP processes only live for the time it takes to deal with each request, so how do you approach that if you're compiling your code? Keep spinning up new processes or rewrite your application code?

Regarding MVC frameworks, try Yii - http://www.yiiframework.com

DonnyV4• 15 years ago

These speed charts are why I would compile Php. http://naspinski.net/post/AspNet-vs-php--speed-comparison.as... It seems worth it too me.

Thanks for the Yii link.

Joeri2• 15 years ago

I wouldn't dismiss PHP's speed problems that quickly. Opcode caches typically don't speed up the actual execution, just the loading and parsing. I use zend server (with zend optimizer) and I've got PHP code that is hard CPU bound, as optimized as it can be, and still takes minutes to run to process perhaps 2 megabytes of raw data. By contrast, the exact same feature implemented in Delphi runs in less than 2 seconds, even though the code is an order of magnitude less efficient.

PHP isn't just orders of magnitude slower than JIT-ed or native compiled languages, but it has no affordances for that fact. There's no standard way to run code in the background. Zend won't start working on one either, because they sell a jobs queue as part of their Zend Server product.

Frankly, a JIT-ed PHP is the only feature I need. I appreciate the syntactic sugar added in the last few revisions of PHP, but honestly, I'd trade every new feature since PHP 5.2 for a bit more speed. With stuff like closures and traits it seems like they're working on the easy stuff instead of the necessary (but hard) stuff.

corford• 15 years ago

Although I don't use it I have heard the symfony2 is one of the better MVC frameworks out there. The same people have also made quite a nice templating language called twig that you may also want to look at (http://twig.sensiolabs.org/).

Udo• 15 years ago

While it's a good idea to look around what language A could borrow from language B once in a while, it's important to not fall into the trap of imitating B at all costs in A.

In this specific case, I don't think it's a good idea to do C#/ASP.Net in PHP and vice versa. Most PHP hosting environments do have a compile-once-run-many-times paradigm by virtue of opcode caching. The advantage over a typical Java or .NET app server is that you can change files and they get automatically recompiled on the fly. So for all intents and purposes, PHP is usually running a piece of in-memory compiled bytecode.

There are many MVC frameworks for PHP, for any interpretation of "MVC" you might want. I'm sure you can find one that's closely modeled after ASP.net, but again I'm not sure this is a productive undertaking in principle.

sipefree3• 15 years ago

It's been a long time since I had any interest at all in PHP, and these new features make me feel uneasy once again.

The development server seems like the only good thing about it.

Traits looks like a silly implementation of multiple inheritance mixins, with a 'use' keyword that doesn't really fit in with the language itself. And the whole 'insteadof' thing looks weird. It will lead to hackish code for many people, encouraging weird monkey-patching.

The author says "when stored in an array", then proceeds to use "$functions['anonymous']". That's not an array. Sigh. I know PHP likes to call them that, but I just find it weird that they would continue to insist on mis-naming two of the fundamental data types of computer science.

The introduction of closures can only be a good thing, and a lot better than the passing of a string name of a function as a callback argument from before.

As usual though, it's expected that most servers and frameworks won't get the update for some time, due to whatever backwards incompatible changes have been made.

I know it's all the rage to hate on PHP these days, but even giving an objective look at the state of the language, given the thriving ecosystems of its competitors, makes it look to me like something I would never touch.

j_col2• 15 years ago

I don't think that PHP referring to hash maps as an array is a bad thing, in fact I've always loved the flexibility of the overloaded array implementation in PHP.

> ...due to whatever backwards incompatible changes have been made.

PHP is normally very good that way, does anyone know of any backwards incompatible changes that have been made?

> I know it's all the rage to hate on PHP these days, but even giving an objective look at the state of the language, given the thriving ecosystems of its competitors, makes it look to me like something I would never touch.

Yes you're right, it is quite fashionable to hate PHP and has been so for the ~10 years I've been using it, but who cares it gets the job done (a language for the pragmatists not the purists).

sipefree3• 15 years ago

> I don't think that PHP referring to hash maps as an array is a bad thing, in fact I've always loved the flexibility of the overloaded array implementation in PHP.

But they're not arrays. JavaScript and Lua do the same thing, allowing you to assign numeric or hashed keys on objects (or tables in Lua), but they don't call them Arrays, because they aren't. Arrays have expected behavior and implementations. So do hash maps. It's fine to amalgamate them, just give it the right name.

> PHP is normally very good that way, does anyone know of any backwards incompatible changes that have been made?

I haven't looked at any in this version, but recently there was an article (I think on HN) complaining about severe ABI changes that required all compiled modules to be recompiled, leading to adoption problems.

> Yes you're right, it is quite fashionable to hate PHP and has been so for the ~10 years I've been using it, but who cares it gets the job done (a language for the pragmatists not the purists).

I used PHP for many years as well, and for that reason I don't think it's a language for the pragmatist at all. It's not expressive enough, it encourages bad coding, and it doesn't have an ecosystem comparable to Ruby, Python, or even the amazing one Node.JS has managed to garner in the past year or so.

zombielifestyle4• 15 years ago

* traits is a concept explored in smalltalk. surely the greates monkey patchers among us.

* array? yeah, it's called like that. it could even be named "fridge" or "smartass".

* due to the new release process php BC is guaranteed for non major versions. adaption will be fast.

* thriving ecosystems don't matter, PHP is just one possible piece in the toolchain.

ericingram• 15 years ago

thriving ecosystems don't matter? that seems like a silly thing to say.

CWIZO• 15 years ago

PHP 5.4 does NOT introduce closures, they've been in there from 5.3.

As for traits, sure but as with all things it depends on who will use them. Some will make a mess out of them, while other will use them properly. Just as with any other feature in any other language. Please stop using this tiered "reason" for why PHP is bad. It's just doesn't hold water.

sipefree3• 15 years ago

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that 5.4 introduced closures, I was more speaking on a long-term level on that note.

wvenable• 15 years ago

Multiple inheritance is a silly implementation of traits/mixins and interfaces. MI combines implementation and type inheritance but with traits/interfaces those concepts are separate and therefore it is much more flexible.

The 'use' keyword already exists in PHP for use with namespaces; it's pretty common for C-based languages to overload common keywords.

As far as I'm aware, there are no backwards incompatible changes in this release and servers have been tracking the most recent PHP versions much better these days.

Also, array[1] is the correct terminology.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associative_array

zombielifestyle4• 15 years ago

Closure::bindTo gives a nice js-like feeling, but i wonder why the hell a invocation of a closure in a class member triggers a warning.

TomNomNom• 15 years ago

Class/object members and methods do not share a "namespace", so it's possible to have a method and a member with the same name. If you assigned a closure to a member that had a colliding method, PHP wouldn't know which one to execute.

I'm guessing this is at least some of the reason for that behaviour.

You can force it to work in the absence of a collision by using a __call override. An example of which can be seen here: https://github.com/TomNomNom/Talk---New-stuff-in-PHP-5.4/blo...

zombielifestyle4• 15 years ago

Didn't think of that, pretty obvious now. ty :)

randallsquared2• 15 years ago

Link didn't work for me, but http://jburrows.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/what-to-look-for-in... did. Not sure why the date would have changed to earlier.

notJim• 15 years ago

I think this may have been posted prematurely. Even in the version you linked to, it seems like part of the traits example has been cut off.

adaburrows3• 15 years ago

It's been fixed. I found the correct revision and restored it with the right date. The original link works again.

philjackson• 15 years ago

What to look for in PHP 5.4: 404 Not found.

I'm going to assume it's a backhanded insult and chuckle along.

Achshar• 15 years ago

its a 404 for me too!

ck22• 15 years ago

Has anyone tested the three opcode caches with the 5.4 release candidates?

I am depressed that eaccelerator seems to be fading away - they removed their shared memory functions for their build with 5.3 support.

In my experience eaccelerator is slightly faster and more stable than xcache. As a bonus, when it did have working shared memory functions (under php 5.2) it has session handler support so sessions are done completely in memory (added: without any additional code or modification)

maratd4• 15 years ago

> it has session handler support so sessions are done completely in memory.

It is unbelievably easy to build session support for other op-code caches. Here is my code for APC:

    if(extension_loaded('session'))
    {
        function ses_open($path, $name)
        {
            return TRUE;
        }
			
        function ses_close()
        {
            return TRUE;
        }
			
        function ses_read($id)
        {
            return (($GLOBALS['session'] = apc_fetch($id)) ? $GLOBALS['session'] : FALSE);
        }
			
        function ses_write($id, $data)
        {
            if(!isset($GLOBALS['session']) || $GLOBALS['session'] != $data)
            {
                if(apc_exists($id))
                {
                    apc_delete($id);
                }
                return apc_store($id, $data);
            }
            else
            {
                return TRUE;
            }
        }
			
        function ses_destroy($id)
        {
            unset($GLOBALS['session']);
            return apc_delete($id);
        }
			
        function ses_gc($max)
        {
            if(
                ($apc = apc_sma_info())
                &&
                ($apc['avail_mem'] / ($apc['num_seg'] * $apc['seg_size'])) < 0.25
            )
            {
                return apc_clear_cache('user');
            }
            else
            {
                return TRUE;
            }
        }
			
        ini_set('session.save_handler', 'user');
        session_set_save_handler('ses_open', 'ses_close', 'ses_read', 'ses_write', 'ses_destroy', 'ses_gc');
    }

The only problem is that this still requires you to compile the session extension. I am looking into ways of working around that, since it's not really used for anything except re-direction.

ck22• 15 years ago

How exactly would you use this with third party code executing on the server that cannot be modified?

eaccelerator's session handler (was) simply built in and requires no modification, just add the one-word setting to your php.ini

timdorr• 15 years ago

You should be using APC. It has all the shared memory functions you need and a lot more momentum than eA ever had. Facebook was even hacking on it for a while before HipHop was developed. It's a much better product overall.

adaburrows3• 15 years ago

I fixed a spelling issue using the iPhone app. For some unknown reason it published an earlier version. It has the same content, but a different date.

adaburrows3• 15 years ago

I just edited the date manually. The original link is back up.

mildweed• 15 years ago

I've been waiting for PHP to use traits my whole professional career as a PHP dev. Super excited they're here now.

coenhyde• 15 years ago

Yeah, the lack of traits/mixins were the biggest problem with php's object model.

kemo• 15 years ago

I still think PHP is good enough. Not the best, the fastest, the safest or the coolest but - good enough.

... and it will remain that way for a long, long time.

What to Look For in PHP 5.4

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