PHP Internals News: Episode 95: PHP 8.1 Celebrations

Thursday, November 25th 2021, 09:23 GMT

In this episode of "PHP Internals News" we're looking back at all the RFCs that we discussed on this podcast for PHP 8.1. In their own words, the RFC authors explain what these features are, with your host interjecting his own comments on the state of affairs.

The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news

Transcript

Derick Rethans 0:14: Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language.
Derick Rethans 0:23: This is episode 95. I've been absent on the podcast for the last few months due to other commitments. It takes approximately four hours to make each episode. And I can now unfortunately not really justify spending the time to work on it. I have yet to decide whether I will continue with it next year to bring you all the exciting development news for PHP 8.2.
Derick Rethans 0:44: However, back to today, PHP eight one is going to be released today, November 25. In this episode, I'll look back at the previous episodes this year to highlight a new features that are being introduced in PHP 8.1. I am not revisiting the proposals that did not end up making it into PHP 8.1 feature two features I will let my original interview speak. I think you will hear Nikita Popov a lot as he's been so prolific, proposing and implementing many of the features of this new release. However, in the first episode of the year, I spoke with Larry about enumerations, which he was proposing together with Ilija Tovilo. I asked him what enumerations are.
Larry Garfield 1:26: Enumerations, or enums, are a feature of a lot of programming languages. What they look like varies a lot depending on the language, but the basic concept is creating a type that has a fixed finite set of possible values. The classic example is booleans. Boolean is a type that has two and only two possible values true and false. Enumerations are way to let you define your own types like that, to say this type has two values Sort Ascending or Sort Descending. This type has four values for the four different card suits, and a standard card deck. Or a user can be in one of four states pending, approved, cancelled or active. And so those are the four possible values that this variable type can have. What that looks like varies widely depending on the language. In a language like C or C++, it's just a thin layer on top of integer constants, which means they get compiled away to introduce at compile time, and they don't actually do all that much they're a little bit to help for reading. On the other end of