PHP Interview PHP developer & release managers of PHP 7.4

eva2000 · May 30, 2019

Interesting interview with one of the release managers responsible for managing the next minor PHP 7.4 release which is currently in pre-alpha testing with first PHP 7.4 alpha release due June 23, 2019 Interview with our developer Peter, one of the release managers of PHP 7.4

3. What are the responsibilities and tasks of a PHP release manager?
A PHP release manager works periodically where he or she creates PHP distribution packages (tarballs) for the release candidate (RC) and stable releases every 2 weeks. With each release it needs to be checked if all tests pass and if changelogs are updated, and certain files needed for further compilation from the end users’ side need to be generated. Release announcements also need to be made over the mailing lists with each release. It is a very “long-distance” task, lasting for several years (minimum 3 years for the period of the particular PHP branch support).

Here, I have to point out that I’m actually one of the two release managers - the other one being Derick Rethans, author of Xdebug, who is more familiar with PHP internals. This week we had our first meeting where we discussed and synced our workflows.

It can however be a very stressful task, since people expect a lot from you for tasks on an open source project. It all depends on people’s free time, because they usually have their daily lives with work and thus need to coordinate their time very well. Of course, the community expects the release to be done on the exact date, and everything needs to work without any problems, so that Drupal and other PHP projects work with the new version as flawlessly as possible.

So, we could definitely say that the role of a release manager entails both the more tech-oriented and the marketing aspects.
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5. Besides the stuff we already discussed, what other new features can we expect in next month’s release? What about in PHP 8.0?
The 7.4 version actually has a lot of new features; they’re also listed here. There are some backwards incompatible changes which means that code will need to be tweaked a little in some cases. Strictly speaking, minor versions shouldn’t contain any backward incompatibilities. These should happen in the major release. However PHP seems to allow minor BC breaks here and there, so the language can progress further.

Besides the previously mentioned new FFI extension, an interesting new feature is preloading. It means loading PHP classes or functions directly into the memory. When you run the program, it works faster compared to usual autoloading approaches. This is a relatively small but important feature as it has long-term potential to be used instead of the autoloading in certain cases.

There are a ton of new features and some extensions were removed since they are no longer properly maintained. Typed Properties is another big thing, very useful for object-oriented programming.

One of the major new features in the next major release PHP 8.0 will certainly be JIT - Just-in-time compiling. It was planned for the 7.4 release but based on the RFC voting it was decided it’s still a bit too early to release it and more time is needed for thorough testing. It’s quite a different concept of compiling PHP code internally and in combination with the FFI extension it enables some really cool stuff because it opens up a whole new world of possibilities to PHP beyond just the web.
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PHP Interview PHP developer & release managers of PHP 7.4

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PHP Interview PHP developer & release managers of PHP 7.4

eva2000 Administrator Staff Member

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