On Wed, Jan 21, 2026 at 12:08 PM Talysson Lima <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > Em seg., 12 de jan. de 2026 às 06:54, Edmond Dantes <[email protected]> > escreveu: > >> Hello all. >> >> I think the New Year holidays are already over for most people. >> Therefore, it would be reasonable to set an approximate voting date if >> nothing changes. Today is January 12. I suggest aiming for February 1. >> >> Best regards, Ed >> > > It's astonishing how such an important issue, one that could change the > direction of PHP and is highly requested by the community – native > asynchronous support in PHP – doesn't receive the necessary attention. > > It's almost disrespectful to the tremendous effort Ed put into it. > Everyone knows that passing the RFC isn't necessary; it's a democratic > process. But apparently, there's a closed group of people who mutually > favor each other and exclude others. Perhaps if this had been proposed by > someone like Nikita, it would have received more attention. > > I see many people with this same opinion going in this direction. Maybe we > should improve our mindset? > > I see many features arriving and being discussed that don't have 1% of the > impact that true async would bring to PHP. You just need to take the time > to look at community groups. Isn't the community taken into consideration? > I think you might be attributing "lack of attention" to something that is far more likely to be caused by "complexity of the changes". Remember that pretty much everyone here (with a very small exception of some internal engineers) are doing voluntary work. Between our professional lives, personal lives, family matters and hobbies, we chime in for a few minutes a day to participate, discuss and improve the language we all enjoy using (although this is an assumption on my part, it's hard to justify contributing on your free time to something you don't actually like). The Async RFC, in any of its versions, has already taken more time from me than all the last 5 years of reading and/or participating in PHP RFCs combined. And even though I have invested a lot more time into it, I can barely say I understand 5% of it. I don't have a vote, so my input here is merely that of an observer, but if at least half the voters are in a similar situation as I am, its very easy to conclude that its not lack of attention or lack of understanding the community wishes. It has been voiced on Internals multiple times by multiple people that this RFC has the potential to be the biggest PHP impact in a very long time. I see no evidence whatsoever of anybody diminishing the value of the subject. We also have a collective knowledge that the PHP community has interest in async execution as stated by the existence of Swoole, ReactPHP, AMPHP, Symfony Runtime, Laravel Octane, Fibers and this RFC. Now, after reading this if you agree with me that 1) we know its big and valuable and 2) we know the community wants it, how do we move forward? I don't have 40 hours/week to dedicate into reading the RFC, understanding everything, running local tests, validating the design choices, and understanding potential BC Breaks. I have tried multiple times to take 30 minutes blocks here and there to go through the information available and try to understand how it would impact my existing projects, how I would use this in production and what could be done to make the experience for PHP developers better and frankly it hasn't gotten me anywhere. The RFC is too big, the concepts is too foreign and the impact is too unknown. If you look at the history of Nikita's proposals or even more recently the history of any RFC proposed and easily accepted, you will find an RFC text that you can skim through in roughly 20 minutes and you will understand: what is it about, whether it affects your usage of PHP or not (not every RFC affects every PHP developer), how localized/contained the change is and why it will be a positive change to the language. Meanwhile, for the Async RFC, I'm willing to bet $100 that if you pick 3 random participants of PHP Internals and magically give them 1 hour of time to digest, they will all come out with different understanding of the proposal and still not understanding enough to be able to cast a vote whether this can be integrated into PHP as-is or not. TL;DR: it's not about whether we think something is more or less important to the PHP community. It's about what we can read, understand, judge, suggest changes and decide if it belongs in PHP or not in our 30-minute per week time slot that we give PHP out of pure personal enjoyment of the language. -- Marco Deleu
