Hi there!

It's that time again: I've started my yearly "What's new in PHP" post. I'll keep it updated throughout the year until PHP 8.3 is released, in November 2023.

I'm not sure yet how to feel about this update: there aren't many exciting things. Instead, it looks like PHP 8.3 will feature a bunch of small quality-of-life improvements. Nothing mind-blowing, but also nothing weird. We'll see how it goes.

If anything stands out, it's the improvements to readonly properties and stack overflow detection. Still, nothing too fancy, but these changes might be useful in the future.

In other internals news, the Foundation announced an important change: major sponsors will be able to voice their opinions on where the Foundation should focus, via a so-called "Advisory Board". I think it's an interesting way of involving important community players. In the end, each change has to be voted on by PHP internals, but major sponsors might be able to steer RFC decisions of the Foundation a bit more than before. I think that's a good thing.

And even more internals news: there's a new RFC: to set up the Technical Committee. This proposed committee could step in to decide on technical issues when core developers don't agree. To be clear: we're not talking about a replacement for RFC voting. No, this committee only addresses technical changes. Like, for example: how to implement an accepted RFC in C code — if there's disagreement amongst internal developers, the Technical Committee could step in to make a final decision. It's still only a proposal though.

In closing, I wanted to share a video I worked on recently. We just released a new version of PhpStorm. I'm especially curious about the performance improvements: do you notice a difference? You can always let me know by replying to this email :)

There's more I wanted to share, but I'm running low on time, so I'll keep some links in my backlog for next week.

Thanks for reading! Have a great week.

Brent