Up And Close With PHP 7’s New RFCs

If you’re following the development of PHP 7, you’ll notice a lot of new RFCs (and some old ones that have been revived) are popping up again. How do you keep track of them and test their functionality?

The answer always used to be: compile PHP from the latest sources and test it yourself. But that’s not very handy, is it?

RFC Watch

Enter the PHP RFC Watch, a very cool side-project of Benjamin Eberlei.

It keeps tracks of the difference PHP RFCs, who voted and what they actually voted. You can filter on the open RFCs at the right-hand side.

Testing new RFC functionality

The PHP community has been really fortunate to have a tool like 3v4l.org, that allows you to spin up a PHP/HHVM shell to test some PHP code – free of charge!.

And as of a few days, there is also support for RFC branches of PHP that you can test!

For instance, want to try out the new Scalar Type hints in PHP7? It includes the strict_mode option and you can test it out in an online shell!

<?php
declare(strict_types=1);
 
foo(); // strictly type-checked function call
 
function foobar() {
    foo(); // strictly type-checked function call
}
 
class baz {
    function foobar() {
        foo(); // strictly type-checked function call
    }
}

This is a really cool resource, I hope more RFC branches make their way to it.

Props to @3v4l_org!