Re: Experimental features

On 04.10.2022 at 22:42, David Rodrigues wrote: > I wanted to suggest the possibility of introducing experimental features to > PHP. > > This is an old thread I guess, but I think it's good to reevaluate the > situation from time to time, as other languages already do this to some > extent and PHP doesn't. Some platforms/languages (Node, Kotlin) and > libraries (React) bring features natively in an experimental way. > > I wanted to propose that we bring this idea into PHP, so we wouldn't have > to wait for new major/minor versions (eg. 9.0 or 8.2, 8.3) to try out these > new features, and so when these versions arrive, they'll already be quite > polished, avoiding patches sometime later due to wider usage of users. Do the other platforms introduce experimental features in revisions? I doubt that, and I'm pretty sure that is (at least currently) no option for PHP. We have several months of bi-weekly pre-releases for new minor/major versions, and are barely able to stabilize new features; not only wrt. to the feature itself, but also wrt. unforeseen side effects. The current release cycle[1] still mostly makes sense to me, and that says for revisions: * Bugfixes only (with a room for exceptions on a case by case basis and only for small self contained features additions) I wouldn't want to sacrifice stability in favor of shipping new features every month – including having more discussions about which feature may be introduced in a revision. [1] <https://wiki.php.net/rfc/releaseprocess#releases_cycle> -- Christoph M. Becker