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 […]
29
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 […]
28
Sep
Sep
How to lint PHP code within the source Ahead-of-time languages check a closed world. Compile a Rust crate, a Go module, a C project with two functions named parse_config, and you never get to run anything at all: the compiler builds the whole symbol table before it hands anything to a linker, and a duplicate […]
25
Sep
Sep
Four ways to count to four: PHP strings, iconv, mbstring and grapheme Nothing like starting the day with a nice café, in a Parisian café, pun intended. Now, when you ask PHP how long the word “Café” is, you get four answers from four families of functions. Two of them agree, one says 5, and […]
24
Sep
Sep
Recently updated PIE extensions #8 (since September 17th, 2026) 18 PHP Pie extensions were updated. carthage-software/ext-typst (0.4.0): PHP extension for the Typst typesetting engine hmennen90/php-steamworks (v0.16.0): PHP extension providing access to the Valve Steamworks SDK via a flat C API phpolygon/php-vio (2.27.0): PHP extension for GPU rendering (OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal), audio, video recording, streaming, and […]
24
Sep
Sep
PHPenomenal 8.6: A Challenge to For PHP’s Next Release PHP 8.6 lands on November 19th, 2026, and with it comes a handful of features that have been simmering in RFCs for a while: partial function application, clamp(), a new Time\Durationclass, #[\Override] on constants, writes on const-held objects, readonly properties with defaults, and a SortDirection enum. […]
22
Sep
Sep
Lazy class constants in PHP: fast by design, sometimes surprising PHP has class constant, which are named literals. It also supports static constant expressions, where the value is not always a literal. Rather, it’s an expression that PHP doesn’t evaluate immediately. PHP evaluates it the first time the code needs it. This is the concept […]
20
Sep
Sep
Vale Reviews Your Comments In The Code Static analysis will tell you a function’s return type is wrong down to the last nullable. It doesn’t tell you that the docblock two lines above it opens with “This class is responsible for,” restates the method signature it’s sitting on, or, this happened, in a project with […]
16
Sep
Sep
What do you mean, redeclare a property static? It started with a single line in a linting run: Fatal error: Cannot redeclare non static DOMElement::$id as static ezcDocumentPropertyContainerDomElement::$id So, a piece of code used to have a property, and now, one of the classes is now trying to redeclare this as a static. Obviously, this […]
15
Sep
Sep
Tracing a PHP CLI application with filo filo is a zero-extension PHP call tracer. No PECL module, no Xdebug session: it registers a file:// stream wrapper and rewrites your code’s AST on the way in, so every function entry and exit gets timed. Your files on disk are never touched: instrumented copies live in a […]