PHP News For September 2019

Here’s a condensed list of things that happened in PHP world during September.

Change in error reporting

In PHP 8, “error_reporting=E_ALL” will be the new default. Currently, PHP uses “E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE ” for error reporting.

Laravel 6 LTS released!

Great news for Laravel fans. Laravel 6 has been released. It now follows schematic versioning. Also, this release includes compatibility with Laravel Vapor, improved authorization responses, job middleware, lazy collections, sub-query improvements, among many other improvements.

Lazy collections will be introduced in Laravel 6.1!

RFC to reclassify current engine warnings

Nikita Popov proposed a RFC for PHP 8.0 to reclassify current engine warnings. This reclassification is aimed at making the current error and warnings more defined. For example, Illegal offset type in unset is currently a Warning. With the reclassification, it will be reclassified as a TypeError exception.

I think that this will help even more as PHP gets bigger. Clarity in engine warning allows users to write code that catch errors in a clearer manner.

RFC for Union Types

Nikita Popov proposed RFC for Union Types (multiple types). This RFC proposes to allow our property types, parameters and returns will be able to handle multiple types. An example is shown below.

public function setNumber(int|float $number): void|int {}

public int|float $number;

Please take note that the above are all encapsulated within a class.

Personally, I think that this a good move as multiple types will give leeway to the current type system and allow us to express ourselves better.

PHP 7.4.0RC2 is available for testing

PHP 7.4.0RC02’s release has been announced by Derick Rethans. The current list of changes for PHP 7.4 can be viewed on GitHub.

GitHub Dependency Graph

Microsoft has announced that they have introduced PHP Dependency Graph for their GitHub platform. Dependency graph was first introduced for JavaScript NPM packages. With this, GitHub users will be able to have a glance on the possible security issues announced for the composer packages they are using. There is also an opt-in available for their beta “automatic security fixes” which sends pull requests to update your package.json file.

PHP UK Conference 2020

Their call for paper is ending on 15 October UTC! If you want to be a part of this amazing PHP conference, do submit your paper on their papercall website!

Conclusion

It has been an exciting month of September for PHP. If there’s any big things that I missed out, feel free to mention them in the comments below! Do tell me how you feel about these news too!

Author: Woo Huiren

Currently a student at National University of Singapore. I contribute to opensource projects - primarily PHP and Angular related. I write about PCF and PWS related stuff too.

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