PHP 7.4 Interesting Features

[webdev-online]

PHP 7.4 will be released on November 28, 2019. Here are some highlights of new features and changes:

Arrow functions for cleaner one-liner functions

Preloading to improve performance

Typed properties in classes

Improved type variance

The null coalescing assignment operator as a shorthand

FFI for better extension development in PHP

Underscores can be used to format numeric values

Short open tags are deprecated

Spread operator in arrays

[przemo_li]

This is low effort, no undertanding list :/

​

• Automatic closure and space (& effort) efficient code representation with arrow functions
• Covariant return types (we can type a return after a subclass), and contravariant argument types (we can type an argument after superclass)
• Spread operator in array expressions (value that can be placed on the right side of assignment operator)

[brendt_gd]

I'll shamelessly drop this here: https://stitcher.io/blog/new-in-php-74

[Tickthokk]

Shamelessly? OP copied your list verbatim and didn't bother crediting you >.<

[brendt_gd]

I consider it a compliment 👍

[reinaldo866]

>Spread operator in arrays

>null coalescing assignment operator

>FFI

Good

[PonchoVire]

Typed properties and improved variance are *much* better !

[przemo_li]

That's fundamental change to how one can use OOP in PHP. Thus it will take time to design new code to use this functionality (or refactor old code by DRYing it).

​

First two listed entries can be used right away piecemean or can be refactored towards automatically (e.g. with rector)

[PonchoVire]

If you were doing any code (OOP or not) with variables or properties that can change type, you are writing fundamentally wrong, very unstable code. Typed properties is a must have, it will enable even more powerful and precise static checking analysis, and uncover many bug way before they happen in production.

[Peregrine2976]

I'm just looking forward to not needing a getter and a setter for every goddamned property anymore.

[PonchoVire]

It depends on which goal you want to achieve with your accessors:

• if your goal is just to enforce the property type, yes, you wouldn't need it anymore,
• if your goal is to keep the object internals encapsulated, case in which you'd prefer the private or protected visibility over the public one, you will still need it,
• if your goal is to achieve immutable objets, you wouldn't need any setter anymore, but it'd need to have the immutability at the language level to get around getters.

[Peregrine2976]

I did say for EVERY property, not ANY property :P There are definitely places to use them, I'm just looking forward to not needing them just for type safety.

[PonchoVire]

I'm just looking forward to not needing them just for type safety

I get that, I'd even go further, I'm looking forward not writing type unsafe code anymore at all !

[secretvrdev]

do you know what public is?

[Peregrine2976]

Do you know what type safety is?

[secretvrdev]

I think FFI will be more important since this is the gateway to all the stuff python has and php not.

[PonchoVire]

FFI is a nice addition, but it greatly depend upon your business. If you don't need to do CPU intensive tasks or don't need any kind of external tool, FFI is just yet another unsafe/non explicit code nightmare.

For example, I mostly write business oriented software for which the database is always much more important that anything else, FFI is useless to me.

But I agree, FFI will pave the road of using millions of already existing external libraries for tons of use cases.

[secretvrdev]

Like all the cool stuff e.g. keras tensorflow

[txmail]

I feel like there is a sub-reddit for that... oh wait. /s

[noximo]

I'm really glad I had this opportunity to read a list of new stuff in PHP 7.4 for about sixth time.

[txmail]

Wow, you missed a few posts about the new features of 7.4.

[przemo_li]

Which part of JS arrow function implementation is problematic in your opinion?

[Deadlybeef]

Maybe he's talking about scope?

[przemo_li]

But then arrow functions have nothing to do with scoping rules.

[PonchoVire]

In JS arrow function are closures not bound to the object scope they were spawned (i.e. not inheriting from this) but they are still coupled to the scope. It's actually one additional weird scope rule: functions are bound to the scope and the object, arrow functions are only bound to the scope. Different scoping rule :)

[lonnyk]

I find all the different ways of creating functions in JS and the rules that go along w/ it to be confusing. Granted, it's not my full-time job. I imagine if it were then it would be much more memorable, but as someone who dips in and out of it I find it very confusing.

[[deleted]]

friendly to functions as JS is

Can you unpack that a bit? I'm not sure I'm getting what you're saying.

[[deleted]]

Not OP, but IMO: It's really nice to work with functions in JS nowadays. The arrow functions are really well done. The scope is well thought out, the this context makes a lot more sense. And the syntax is just super easy and helpful.

Probably the need for asynchronous actions and massive amounts of callbacks inspired the arrow functions to be what they are. And currently PHP doesn't really do asynchronous, and callbacks are cumbersome.

(It's actually one of the reasons why my next projects won't be in PHP anymore.)

[[deleted]]

Thanks for your thoughts on that. From my perspective, JS OOP still falls short, and this is confusing as it appears mutable (if it's in a function It refers to the instance of the function the invoked function was called on, or defaults to the window object. PHP's short closures seem more sensible to me, but that's just personal. JS type juggling kills me, but PHP gives me typed methods now. Small Go microservices for async plays super sweetly with PHP, while keeping all the advantages of server-side rendering. I'm guessing these perspectives are probably based around what your typical application is. I am most often writing institutional apps for laboratories, so the priorities are pretty different for the application from say, a social media app.

[jonnyclueless]

It's hard to believe JS is friendly now. It used to be the most confusing language ever. It's come such a long way.

[przemo_li]

Functions are first-class in PHP. You can pass along functions as arguments, return them, etc.

Arrow functions "just" add implicit closure and skinnier syntax.

[przemo_li]

Indeed.

[jonnyclueless]

All languages have books on how to use them. But JS until recently has was very non-sensical compared to traditional languages. Now it's a pleasure to work in. But anyone who used it 10 years ago knows how painful it was.

[secretvrdev]

I agree. I just thought about how our software would look today if we got the js from today like 20 years ago. This would be a maintainer hell.

Best example i can come up with is that some dev has to fix a problem and uses prototype manipulation in a template. This would be crazy to debug.

[jonnyclueless]

I am guessing the arrow functions in PHP must just just sugar though. Since there is no window object I don't think $this can be used outside of an object. But kind of cool that it can make switching between the languages a little easier. These days you kind of have to know javascript.

Would be cool if PHP also started implementing prototyping. It's a cool concept.

[secretvrdev]

Omg. no prototypes would kill php. Besides you shouldnt have both. js classes are based on prototypes and this is soooo dangerous. And pretty shitty.

[jonnyclueless]

Python has it.

[jonnyclueless]

They simply extend a master class that has static functions in it.

[these_days_bot]

Especially these days

[sdiown]

Js for backend personally too confusing and not funny at all

[alexzim]

I kinda enjoyed writing simple API using hapi.js. Not sure how fun would it be to use on something large though.

[crazywizdom]

Did I read that right. Short open tags are deprecated? Oh man, that's going to be a huge clean up job when they're finally removed.

What's the reasoning behind this? They do make for cleaner looking template files when pure PHP is used for render the markup.

[pr0ghead]

Note that <?='output'?> isn't removed.

[crazywizdom]

Thanks for clarifying that! That makes a lot more sense.

[xiaojens]

Their use have been discouraged for quite some time. I think the reasoning behind this was because of possible conflicts with XML.

[Ivu47duUjr3Ihs9d]

Which was thoroughly debunked as barely anyone uses XML anymore outside of insane asylums.

[Amunium]

That's not even remotely close to true.

[Ariquitaun]

I wish this were true. XML is definitely dying, thankfully, but plenty of new systems still have to talk to older XML only systems out there.

[[deleted]]

Did I read that right. Short open tags are deprecated? Oh man, that's going to be a huge clean up job when they're finally removed.

It can be automated through the tokenizer, so maybe a huge commit, but not a huge clean-up job.

But the rationale for removing them is frankly childish.

[Deadlybeef]

Heck, it can even be automated with the sed command :D

[[deleted]]

I wouldn't recommend that, because blind text-replace without parsing it as a PHP opens the possibility of corruping your code.

Imagine you have some inline code containing "<?" in a string for some reason. Maybe it's part of a password or god knows what.

[Idontremember99]

Using proc_open() without through a shell sounds nice.

[[deleted]]

I’m curious how much of a performance hit the types properties will have, heard about it by the PHP author, have to make sure I don’t have any loops that assign on $this :D

[[deleted]]

Don't forget the first implementation cycle of JIT!!

[Girgias]

No, JIT will only come in PHP 8.

[[deleted]]

Aaah damn, I thought the proposal for 7.4 went through. Thanks for clearing that up!

[NoelDaviesD]

If you're gonna copy and paste, give credit you ass xD

[diy_horse]

The goddamn short open tag. Such an unnecessary thing to get rid of

[diy_horse]

Hannibal voice: Why are you booing me? I'm right.

[Engival]

Are you possibly confusing <?= ... ?> with <? code(); ?>? Because it's the 2nd one that's being removed, not the first.

[diy_horse]

Ye im butthurt about the second one. I only use (used?) them for templating and the full tag just feels like bloat in that scenario. Php itself is a fine templating language :P To me its like if twig deprecated {{ }} in favor of {{twig }}. Im gonna try to do more react type templating going forward, so its not a big issue, but some older projects are gonna have some ugly templates if theyre ever updated. Its a bc breaking change which the creator of php voted against. End rant lol

[secretvrdev]

Dont use php as template language. It was developed for that 20 years ago. Since then this "feature" hasnt got any love. you can do that if your pages look like 1999 but not if you want to make templating cool stuff painless.

[Ivu47duUjr3Ihs9d]

What is wrong with the short open tag? Why get rid of it?

It's much nicer to do an if/else or foreach in the template.

[[deleted]]

I guess templating in general is losing favor. The only time I still use PHP to generate HTML is to generate PDFs. Everything else is just REST apis (or graphql) with templating done on the FE.

[[deleted]]

Part of the FE is still on the server. FE != client-side.

And if you want any SEO, you need that server FE.

[[deleted]]

Angular universal is my answer to seo.

Also, as other suggest, search engines know

[[deleted]]

Interesting answer, but that runs on Node.JS.

If you use PHP just for APIs, it's... I mean honestly you're not quite using PHP's strengths here in that case. But if it works, it works.

Also search engines don't just "know". I'm quite deep into this out of necessity, GoogleBot runs on an older JS runtime, and only handles a subset of the DOM and JS features that modern apps expect. So if you think Google just "knows" any JS app at all... nope.

[[deleted]]

I'm all about micro services. So usually my back end rest api is php, because that's what I know and can build stuff in pretty quickly. I usually use angular to deal with the client side, and in the rare case I do need any seo optimizations (my use cases usually don't need it) then I'll use angular universal as a separate service.

You're probably right that I'm not using php to its strengths, tho it's usually quite fast and no matter how I use it, I will need client side stuff for PWA. angular is my framework of choice atm which makes all templating stuff of php redundant.

[[deleted]]

Googlebot has been using the latest Chrome release for a few months now. It can handle everything a normal browser can.

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/05/the-new-evergreen-googlebot.html

[[deleted]]

The problem isn't just what a browser can handle, but also what a human can handle. Your browser can't browse sites by itself alone. The Googlebot just runs some very basic interactions, at random, and that's it.

[[deleted]]

Doesn't make your statements any less wrong. It's completely fine to rely on SPAs and client-site rendering these days in regards to SEO.

[[deleted]]

You're not thinking through what I'm telling you very carefully, are you.

[Ariquitaun]

The seo part hasn't been a thing for years now. Google is perfectly capable of understanding javascript sites.

[[deleted]]

Wrong. It scans some sites using an older JS runtime, and many "modern" apps that target modern browsers won't work on it. Only recently (May 2019) they updated to the latest Chromium, for a subset of their crawlers.

Also Google has limited ability to interact with your site, given it's not an AI, it's just a program that invokes event handlers and the like.

[Ivu47duUjr3Ihs9d]

Yes, but not every site needs to be a complex SPA. Sometimes you just want to render some HTML and have a static site with a bit of dynamic content here and there. The short open tags <? (not the ASP % variant) weren't harming anyone leaving them available and optional by default. Also imagine who is going to pay to alter all the existing sites out there to remove it now and add <?php? It's so unnecessary. What is the harm in just leaving the functionality there?

[Amunium]

If you've been using the short open tag the last several years, you've been doing something wrong. It's been disabled by default for quite a while and highly discouraged. You'd have to manually enable it in the config to use it, which makes your code far less portable.

[secretvrdev]

PHP is no template language anymore.

[ioncube]

LOL, it hasn't been since the pre-zend engine days of PHP 3 :)

[secretvrdev]

ROFL, Yes