What 3052 composer.json files tell us about the Composer plugin ecosystem I like to read composer.json files the way other people read tea leaves. Take enough of them and patterns emerge: which packages everyone depends on, which ones are stuck two major versions behind, and what a minimum-stability field says about a maintainer’s risk tolerance. […]
19
Aug
Aug
The Secret Life of “Magic Null” in PHP PHP 8 has started a tightening in native functions arguments: every version brings stricter checks on calls to common functions. Gone are the days of passing null into a function expecting an integer and hoping for the best. Today, usort($arr, null) or array_walk($arr, null) will instantly crash […]
18
Aug
Aug
PHP Method Resolution Order: Class · Trait · Parent · Interface PHP offers three different places to define a method: directly in a class, in a trait the class uses, and in a parent class it extends. Interfaces define contracts, the method signatures without a body, so they don’t contribute an implementation to the chain, […]
14
Aug
Aug
Recently updated PIE extensions (since 7th, 2026) 24 PHP Pie extensions were updated. bsn4/grpc (v0.3.0): Rust-based gRPC extension for PHP — drop-in replacement for ext-grpc flow-php/flow-php-ext (0.43.0): Flow PHP native extension (Rust) – Floe frame-body encoder/decoder for DataFrame Rows xberg-io/tree-sitter-language-pack (v1.15.0): Pre-compiled tree-sitter grammars for 371 programming languages thomas-0816/pdo-duckdb-php (1.5.5.7): PHP PDO Driver for DuckDB, […]
13
Aug
Aug
What Can Implement An Interface In PHP? Ask a PHP developer what implements an interface, and you will get class Foo implements Bar. Ask again, insist a little, and you might get abstract class. Ask a third time and people start looking at their shoes. Yet the implements keyword, and its cousin, extends, has a […]
12
Aug
Aug
Two Large PHP Datasets, and How to Read Them With Itself PHP has a large code base online. At Exakat, we run the engine on a corpus of 3000+ open source projects. If you want to train, fine-tune, or evaluate an AI model on PHP code, or just mine a few hundred thousand real-world snippets […]
09
Aug
Aug
Convert a boolean into a string What could go wrong? I was recently spelunking through the Cornstack/nomic training dataset, the massive corpus of code that feeds some of our modern AI overlords, when I noticed something amusing. One of the queries in that dataset ask how to “convert a boolean to a string in PHP,” […]
06
Aug
Aug
The Case Of The Insensitive Filesystem There is a special kind of bug that only exists between your laptop and the production server. It compiles, it tests, it ships, and then it 500s. Somewhere along the way, User.php became user.php, and one of the two machines had an opinion about it. PHP has no opinion. […]
04
Aug
Aug
When PHP Meet Unicode: A Tour of Identifiers Beyond ASCII Every year, like clockwork, someone rediscovers that a day is not reliably 86400 seconds long, gets righteously indignant about daylight change on Hacker News, and two hundred comments later the whole internet has relearned a lesson it relearns every March and October. PHP’s “you can […]
25
Jul
Jul
I Checked Every php.* Domain on the Internet There are 1,437 top-level domains recognized by IANA today, things like .com, .museum, .fr, and obscure ones such as .ismaili and .bugatti. I decided to find out how much of the internet’s php.* namespace has actually been claimed, checking php.<tld> against every single one of them and […]
24
Jul
Jul
__FILE__: The Magic Constant With Specific Usage Every older PHP developer has meet __FILE__ early, usually while copy-pasting a WordPress plugin header from a tutorial written in 2009. There are lots of blogs posts documenting it: it is also quite famous outside the PHP universe. Nowadays, however useful is this magic constant, it seems it […]