To lighten up some discussion here, I would like to ask what features or changes you would love to see in future PHP versions? We know that in recent versions a lot of nice adjustments were added, but I bet most of us dreams for more.
I personally would love to see types on inline variables, at first even not strict. However, I don’t know if it’s remotely possible with how currently the language is implemented.
Genetics, updated built-in functions (types, order of arguments, naming), better attribute reading support (should be easier), threads or support long running processes, one line methods (kotlin like), updated env-var handling especially $_SERVER/POST/GET…
Honestly I’m pretty happy with PHP 8 from a feature set standpoint.
Threading would be nice but generally I want long running tasks to run outside of the HTTP stack anyway so that’s less of an issue.
I wish wish the dollar signs and semicolons were optional. And I wish -> was replaced with a single character that’s easy to type. Like maybe the . key. PHP is a great language with pretty terrible syntax.
Mainly because you’ve got to setup PHP to be debuggable in the first place.
And setting up PHP is already a hassle. When a dev has to set up php in about 5 separate ways just to figure out which one is actually debuggable, then PHP has a problem.
Proper typing of nested or generic types. For instance: generic classes or array elements without phpdoc’s template.
For me the typing of array elements is the most important one. As soon as you have some form of array, the typing in php ends. I see this as such a short coming in the growing type system of php. Seeing a lonely array type always leaves me questioning simple things like: What kind of array is it, a list of strings, objects? Or maybe an associative array? Does it even hold items? Why are we here?
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