PHP 5.5.0 Alpha 6 - Released

http://php.net/archive/2013.php#id2013-03-07-1

by Jeremy1026 • 13 years ago

96 71 13 years ago

Mahn9• 13 years ago

Any noteworthy changes on 5.5 overall? I'm happy the language is moving forward with a seemingly faster traction than before (github effect?), but I haven't heard of any game changing feature getting implemented yet since quite a while. Still waiting for a object literals syntax myself.

prg318• 13 years ago

https://raw.github.com/php/php-src/php-5.5.0alpha6/NEWS

ecaron4• 13 years ago

The new changes I'm looking forward to are the password hashing API, scalar type hints and generators.

I'm also looking forward to 3 things that AREN'T going to be there: register_global, safe mode, and magic_quotes

calinet6• 13 years ago

Wow, those are finally going away? It's almost like the end of an era. Cool.

Jeremy10263• 13 years ago

I too am looking forward to the new Password Hashing API. Having quick ability to hash and verify a password should save a fair bit of time in the long run.

nachteilig• 13 years ago

The password hashing stuff should be really nice in the long run--at least when it's widely used.

PHP in particular seems to have a lot of bad home brew implementations out there, so it'll be nice to have a better default.

verisimilitude• 13 years ago

In the meantime, I really enjoy using Marco Arment's Bcrypt PHP class: https://gist.github.com/marcoarment/1053158

jcoby6• 13 years ago

There is a PHP 5.3.7+ implementation of the password API here: https://github.com/ircmaxell/password_compat

mscarborough• 13 years ago

It seems to continue the PHP 5.4 vein in that it adds some syntactic shortcuts and some niceties that make it a bit easier / cleaner to read and write.

Personally I'm pretty happy with traits and array dereferencing against function returns. The new array literal syntax is nicer and more like other languages, in that you don't have to wrap everything with array(), instead just use the [] syntax.

Feature-wise 5.4 added traits and 5.5 has generators.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration54.new-features.php

http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration55.new-features.php

RossM2• 13 years ago

It should be noted that the release of 5.5.0 could be delayed a bit, due to the late addition of Zend Optimizer+ [0] (an opcode cache) being included into the core release like APC.

However there's a lot of arguing on php.internals about whether or not the right number of votes was reached (based on a not-specific-enough RFC on voting) so it may not even make it in.

[0] http://files.zend.com/help/Zend-Server-Community-Edition/con...

Mahn9• 13 years ago

So is Zend Optimizer meant to replace APC altogether, or just co-exist with APC? I've been using APC quite extensively assuming it would make it into the core eventually.

cabirum• 13 years ago

Besides opcode caching, APC provides shared key-value storage. I don't really see why they chose Zend over APC as a standard opcache. Also, they are incompatible and cannot run together.

lonnyk3• 13 years ago

Yes, it would replace APC. Unless you are using the user-caching of APC it should not affect you.

ck2• 13 years ago

If anyone wants to try Zend Optimizer+ I threw together a control panel for it, which it was missing compared to APC:

https://gist.github.com/ck-on/4959032

I've found Optimizer+ has a few shortcomings, like no way to delete individual files from the cache, it's an all or nothing reset if you turn off file stat.

However it's definitely a bit faster than APC, at least 10% in most cases because of its multiple optimization passes.

thetrumanshow• 13 years ago

I'd like to get a sense of how often the PHP community tends to upgrade languages and frameworks for legacy products. Always/Never? Anyone care to provide some anecdote?

For example, I have two Rails apps that are running on Rails 2.2.x, so yeah, they're way behind, and I feel some sense of urgency to upgrade them soon... but I believe I am an outlier in the Ruby/Rails community in the sense that I am not upgrading all the time.

Jeremy10263• 13 years ago

PHP tends to remain backwards compatible for a few major versions. Right now PHP has stable recent releases of 5.4 and 5.3. There is a bunch of older (5.2 and lower) PHP installs running around the web as well, since many cheap shared hosts aren't quick to update their installs.

Spoom• 13 years ago

We keep up to date on the build version, but the first decimal version (4 in 5.4, is that considered the minor version?) usually involve at least some backward-incompatible changes, so there is usually a need to test the codebase against new minor versions.

jcoby6• 13 years ago

Personally, I always wait at least one year before upgrading PHP. There are always segfault or security issues or odd problems in a 5.x.0 release. It's around 5.x.4 that it becomes just stable enough to use.

About a month or two before I decide to upgrade I run the newer version locally while I'm developing (but being sure to not use any newer features). This usually weeds out any major incompatibilities and fix new warnings.

That said, I'm running 5.3 in production and have no real plans to upgrade to 5.4 anytime soon.

lonnyk3• 13 years ago

>That said, I'm running 5.3 in production and have no real plans to upgrade to 5.4 anytime soon.

May I ask: why not?

Joeri• 13 years ago

Also on 5.3. I'm encoding my php files with zend guard, and they don't support php 5.4 yet, which is ironic given that it's zend.

Mahn9• 13 years ago

Right now I'd say the only major "jump" that exists is the one between PHP 4 (released +10 years ago) and PHP 5. Other than that, apps are largely backwards compatible between 5.x versions, except for a few minor changes that no dev really stresses about.

The thing about PHP is that since it's massively used around the net, rather than forcing devs to catch up with the language, PHP devs themselves try as much as possible not to break backwards compability. Which in many ways is a pity, but that seems to be the direction of the language at the moment.

signifiers• 13 years ago

Actually, I would call 5.3 as a fairly major jump - namespaces, closures (Lambda/anonymous functions), late static binding, const's allowed outside of classes. There are several popular PHP frameworks that require v. 5.3+. Some people even go so far as to call the 5.3.x branch “php 6 without Unicode”.

Udo• 13 years ago

I usually upgrade as soon as it's stable. There has never been a downside as far as I can remember, because the old stuff usually just keeps on working. Whether that's been good for the language itself is debatable, but I imagine it sure helped adoption since they almost never break anything when they push out a new version.

kijin• 13 years ago

As recently as this week, I came across a production server that was running PHP 4.4.x. A lot of popular apps continue to be written with PHP 4 compatibility in mind, which really hinders their ability to clean up bad code. Security updates for PHP 4 have been non-existent for several years already, so I try to stay away from these machines. Well, actually, I think some Linux distros (Red Hat?) still offer security updates for PHP 4, or did so until quite recently, but I can't remember the exact versions/dates.

A large number of web hosts still run PHP 5.2.x, while many have migrated to PHP 5.3. My last PHP 5.2-based client moved to a PHP 5.3-enabled web host a few weeks ago, so I'm finally free to use namespaces and closures.

Debian Stable and Ubuntu LTS are currently on PHP 5.3.x, which I suspect is partially responsible for the lack of PHP 5.4 adoption.

As for myself, I'm planning to rebuild my Ubuntu LTS dev box when Mint 15 comes out, so that's when I'll be upgrading to PHP 5.4. No need to hurry when none of my clients can use it anyway.

samuellevy• 13 years ago

Dreamhost, as a shared hosting provider, has within the last month rolled out the option of PHP 5.4 on all their servers.

I wish all hosting providers would make newer versions available, then maybe open source projects would move with the times, and start bringing everyone up to date.

nikic4• 13 years ago

For those wondering what the new features for PHP 5.5 are at this point, here is a small (not complete) list:

Large language changes:

* Generators and coroutines (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/generators by me)

* `finally` blocks (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/finally by laruence)

Syntactic sugar:

* Support for function calls in `empty()` (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/empty_isset_exprs by me)

* Support for `list()` in foreach (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/foreachlist by laruence)

* Constant array/string dereferencing (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/constdereference by laruence)

* Getting the fully qualified class name using `ClassName::class` (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/class_name_scalars by ralph)

Standard library:

* Simplified password hashing API (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/password_hash by ircmaxell)

* `hash_pbkdf2()` function (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/hash_pbkdf2 by ircmaxell)

* DateTimeImmutable, which is an immutable variant of DateTime (by derick)

Key anti-features (aka BC breaks):

* Dropped Windows XP and 2003 support (by pierre)

* ext/mysql deprecated (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/mysql_deprecation by aharvey)

* preg_replace /e modifier deprecated (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/remove_preg_replace_eval_modifier by me)

* Logo GUIDs removed (by ajf)

For the beta 1 (the next planned released) at least two more things are planned:

* Bundling of ZendOptimizer+ (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/optimizerplus by zeev)

* Allowing non-scalar Iterator keys in foreach (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/foreach-non-scalar-keys by me)

nolok• 13 years ago

Are ZendOptimizer and APC meant to cohabitate in the core, or is the former going to replace the later ?

Any news on object literals $o = {'abc': 456}; and scalar type hint ?

Thanks for all the hard work, improvement in the language in 5.3 and 5.4 were awesome.

nikic4• 13 years ago

ZO+ will replace APC, only the user-cache from APC will be left (see also this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5343883).

Object literals and scalar type hints won't be in 5.5. Scalar type hints may be in the next version (it's a rather tricky topic). For object literals I don't see reason to add them at all (in PHP you can just use arrays ^^).

ecaron4• 13 years ago

I feel like there are dark factors at play for dropping the XP support. Although the most thorough discussion of it is at http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/177732/why-wa..., the conspiracist in me says that Microsoft (pierre's employer) pressured him to drop support - even though it wasn't entirely necessary to do so.

mratzloff2• 13 years ago

That's a good catch, and the justification was a little soft. But would you blame them?

dmethvin• 13 years ago

The answers in that thread seem to be reasonable. XP is a decade-old OS, we should be glad that it will finally pass on April 2014. Supporting multiple operating systems takes time, especially for one that old. At some point it's best to move on.

If your company is affected by lack of XP support in this PHP build, it should be a temporary convenience at worst. What are your plans to migrate off XP over the next year? As of next April there will be no patches or security fixes coming for XP. Is your company planning on paying Microsoft for continued support, or will it negotiate extended XP support in return for buying company-wide Windows 8 licenses and start the ride over again?

I suspect that many of the people using XP today are frozen and wouldn't upgrade their PHP anyway, for the same reasons they're using XP and IE6. They either don't want to change their software because of cost/risk issues or the people who wrote it moved on years ago and they have no idea how it works.

mappu• 13 years ago

Regarding XP support; i'm not invested in this discussion, but the code has #defines for NETWARE[1], riscos[2], and even CRAY[3] in it... The last NetWare and RISC OS releases were (surprisingly to me) only 3 years ago, but surely XP is even now a much bigger deployment target? How often does the CRAY code get tested?

1. http://lxr.php.net/search?q=&defs=&refs=NETWARE&...

2. http://lxr.php.net/search?q=__riscos__&defs=&refs=&#...

3. http://lxr.php.net/search?q=CRAY&defs=&refs=&pat...

mratzloff2• 13 years ago

Hey, great work on that generators patch! Very well documented. It's been years since I wrote PHP but it's nice to know that if I have to at some point I'll have some things I like from Python and other languages available to me now.

yogo4• 13 years ago

Good stuff nikita, keep up the great work. I also vote for getting object literals added (it will be a great addition to the array literals).

mgkimsal2• 13 years ago

This is at best meta, or at worst off-topic, but I have to say with 30+ comments at the moment, this is one of the best post/discussions I've read on HN with PHP as a main focus so far - technical, no flaming, some good insights and links. Thanks everyone :)

rijoja• 13 years ago

This won't add much either. I was kind of hoping for a flame-war but the feedback proved to be much more interesting than reading old clichés.

ch0wn• 13 years ago

Does someone know how the test suite works? The way I understand [0] there currently 66 failing tests for the 5.5 line. Is this correct?

[0] http://gcov.php.net/viewer.php?version=PHP_5_5

PHP 5.5.0 Alpha 6 - Released

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