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In this episode of “PHP Alive and Kicking,” Mike and Chris engage in a discussion with Sara Golemon, a prominent PHP Internals developer and release manager.

The conversation kicks off with Sara sharing her unique journey into PHP development, which began unexpectedly from a tech support role for the US government, ultimately leading her to become a significant contributor to the language. Sara elaborates on her work with HHVM and its influence on PHP’s evolution, highlighting her current efforts related to composable functions and her participation in PHP Foundation meetings.

The PHP Foundation, established a few years ago, plays a crucial role in funding PHP development, addressing the bus factor problem, and enhancing stability by supporting dedicated developers.

The episode delves into the anticipated PHP 8.5 release, discussing its expected general availability and key new features such as ‘clone with’ and the pipe operator. Additionally, Sara addresses the complexities of exception handling in PHP, particularly in the context of deeply nested function calls and where exceptions should be caught in a call stack. As the conversation progresses, several new features in PHP 8.5 are categorized into S-tier, A-tier B-tier D-tier (deprecations), including enhancements to property visibility, error handling, and core functionalities.

The discussion also touches on the features introduced in PHP 8.3, such as graphim-aware Levenstein distance and persistent cURL share handles, alongside a review of deprecations. Sara highlights ongoing changes in the language, including the deprecation of constant redefinition and the incrementing of non-numeric strings, providing historical context for these decisions. Other deprecated features discussed include the `http_response_header` local variable and the backtick operator, as well as unexpected syntax elements like using semicolons to terminate case values in switch statements.

Finally, the episode concludes with Sara discussing the continuous improvement of PHP, the crucial role of the foundation in supporting developers, and the ongoing efforts to enhance transparency in the project’s governance.

Throughout the show, a few links were discussed:

The PHP Foundation  – https://thephp.foundation/

The Open Collective Page – https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation

The PHP8.5 Todo Page – https://wiki.php.net/todo/php85

The RFC List – https://wiki.php.net/rfc

The post PHP Alive and Kicking Episode 2: Sara Golemon appeared first on PHP Architect.