PHP has a Spoofchecker: A 14-Year-Old Tool You’re Probably Not Using The Spoofchecker class has shipped with PHP since 5.4, released in March 2012. That’s the same year the iPhone 4S was current, “Gangnam Style” dropped, and PHP 5.3 was still the dominant version on the west. Fourteen years later, most PHP developers, including me, […]
The 2,000th word: a personal notebook became a map of PHP Today the PHP Dictionary reaches its 2,000th definition: bearer token, is the last entry, and, as you can see, it is quite niche subject for a definition and PHP. This is because, over the years, a lot of definitions were added to what was […]
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Oct
Oct
Recently updated PIE extensions #11 (since October 8th, 2026) 40 PHP Pie extensions were updated. flow-php/arrow-ext (0.46.0): Apache Arrow and Parquet bindings for flow-php/parquet (Rust) iliaal/mdparser (0.8.0): Native C CommonMark + GitHub Flavored Markdown parser for PHP, targeting CommonMark 0.31 + GFM. ~10-20x faster than pure-PHP parsers, zero runtime dependencies. phpolygon/php-vio (2.33.0): PHP extension for […]
14
Oct
Oct
PHP ❤️ Rust: Every Bridge Between Two Worlds An Elephant and a Crab Walk Into a Bar PHP and Rust have been walking toward each other from across the room for years. One is the elephant: over thirty years old, used by about 70% of the websites whose server-side language W3Techs can identify, and believes […]
13
Oct
Oct
foreach Already Knows: PHP and the Zero-One-Infinity Rule This loop doesn’t ask when or if $recipients a list. It doesn’t ask anything, although, well, it does ask for an array or an iterable. Now, when $recipients holds three users, it runs three times. If it holds one, it runs once. If it’s empty, the body […]
09
Oct
Oct
A Hard Memory Ceiling for PHP Scripts That Run for Hours You inherit a legacy table full of auto-incrementing integers and a new architecture that wants UUIDs. You write a CLI worker, build an in-memory lookup array mapping old IDs to new ones, and let it run. Forty thousand rows in, the terminal stops mid-scroll […]
08
Oct
Oct
26 PHP Pie extensions were updated. flow-php/arrow-ext (0.45.0): Apache Arrow and Parquet bindings for flow-php/parquet (Rust) phpolygon/php-vio (2.30.0): PHP extension for GPU rendering (OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal), audio, video recording, streaming, and input symfony/deepclone (v0.8.8): Export any serializable PHP values as pure arrays – accelerator for Symfony’s DeepCloner phalcon/cphalcon (v5.22.1): Phalcon is an open source web […]
05
Oct
Oct
Discover PHP 8.6 Through Its New Error Messages A guided tour of what will bark at your code when you move, and how you should care now PHP 8.6 lands in November 2025. You have a few weeks left to run your test suite on the release candidate, spot the deprecation notices, and fix them […]
02
Oct
Oct
Building the Call Along the Way A function call is always atomic with PHP. The target and every argument must converge at the same place, at the same moment, or nothing happens. This doesn’t sound like a limitation, rather a cooking recipe: you’re not going to start your strawberry pie in Winter, with the pie […]
01
Oct
Oct
Recently updated PIE extensions #9 (since September 24th, 2026) 27 PHP Pie extensions were updated. iliaal/mdparser (0.7.0): Native C CommonMark + GitHub Flavored Markdown parser for PHP, targeting CommonMark 0.31 + GFM. ~10-20x faster than pure-PHP parsers, zero runtime dependencies. symfony/deepclone (v0.8.7): Export any serializable PHP values as pure arrays – accelerator for Symfony’s DeepCloner […]
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Sep
Sep
ulimit and PHP: When the OS Says No You set memory_limit and max_execution_time in php.ini and feel in control. You are, in fact, but you are also not the only one in control. Underneath PHP, the kernel keeps its own ledger of what a process is allowed to do, and it does not negotiate. That […]