I know that many people talked about this over and over.
Why it’s not possible to change the old PHP API ?
The answer is always because it will make HUGE BC breaks
I’ve seen this wonderful idea about scalar objects authored by nikic
github https://github.com/nikic/scalar_objects.
This will become even more possible when PHP 7 is introduced because of
scalar types and many great features making the idea more reliable.
This makes an opportunity to replace the old API with object oriented one
preventing any kind of BC break.
But instead of using this as an extension because of some limitations like
“string”->startsWith(‘s’); the API should be bundled with the engine (not
written in PHP).
This will make the opportunity to also remove any inconsistencies in the
API behavior as well.
I know that many people here will say that it’s not that important
developers get used to this API and many tutorials based on it.
But it’s actually really important for the future of the language may be
not so much for the existing developers (I disagree it’s). but this will
also encourage new comers to use PHP.
I’ve seen many articles encouraging new comers to learn languages like
Python or Ruby, and highly discourage them from using PHP. Also many new
projects are using languages different than PHP. (don’t tell me you haven’t
seen this)
This will be an issue the number of language users will drop significantly
over the years causing the death of the language.
I know that this is not an easy task. But this is a wonderful opportunity
to do this without BC breaks. I’m not suggesting that this should be for
PHP 7.0 because it will take a lot of work may be for any release in PHP
7.*
PHP internals around 40 people ? not really sure but I know you are very
busy with fixing bugs and you have a lot of work already if you think this
is a huge task it can be assigned to a good group of people similar to how
the amazing PHP Framework Interop Group has accomplished,
for Designing the new Object Oriented API. PHP internals will vote on the
design and implement it.
The old API should be deprecated in PHP 8.0 and removed completely in PHP
9.0 (finally)
I hope that you take this seriously and tell me if there are any
limitations that prevents this from happening.
