Hello Internals!

Here is a point of view from an active user land developer on PHP development and feature requests and the politics going on in internals.

Right now I think PHP has reached a milestone, where it is a need to take a break from large feature developing, witch takes a lot of time and effort, and do the cleanup stuff - bugs, accepted and unfinished features, make enhancement on existing stuff and clean up the code. New features should still come in, but the focus really should be to make a cleanup. I have observed over 3-4 years now some good RFC's that had been just forgotten, despite the fact that they were welcomed and work has been done. For example:

The Tainted Variable RFC - https://wiki.php.net/rfc/taint - personally I would prefer that feature right now over any new feature, because it gives the ability to check for insecure variable handling and make sure you don't miss something. A major security enhancement on the language level (how the people can and will abuse it is not the issue - people do SQL selects in loops - tainted variable abuse is just negligent compared to that one) - isn't it worth the effort to finish that and release?

The Lemon parser - https://wiki.php.net/rfc/lemon - I remember a lot of discussions on that and work being done and people wanting to do it. What happened?

Error handling RFC's - https://wiki.php.net/rfc/error-optimizations and https://wiki.php.net/rfc/enhanced_error_handling - it's sitting there for quite some time. Any thought on that? Because error handling improvements will benifit all PHP developers - every single PHP developer out there in the wild.

PHP Native Interface - https://wiki.php.net/rfc/php_native_interface - sounds and looks like a good and important project.

And I even will not touch the topic of type hints and return type hints. At least param type hinting should be dealt with and done something about it, because right now it's at a half-completed state - only arrays and objects are supported.

And probably the RFC wiki should be looked at and sorted out - there are some things implemented and rejected, witch haven't been moved to proper sections.

Said all that - I think annotations should be dropped for 5.4 for now and the development and refining continued until it's properly scrutinized, tested and ironed out. Right now to focus on delivering stuff that's all ready done or near completed (performance improvements for example) and look at the backlog and bugs.

Arvids.