Re: Future stability of PHP?

On 9 Apr 2023, at 23:10, Kamil Tekiela <tekiela246@gmail.com> wrote: > I wonder about this every time I hear this claim. What exactly changed in PHP 8.0 that made the > upgrade path so difficult? The upgrade to PHP 9 may be a little more difficult because of some of > the recent deprecations, but that's still years ahead of us. Most of the deprecations and changes do make sense, and while deprecating dynamic properties is going to be a pain, I think it's going to be worth it (like undefined variables), same with ${} string interpolation (better to be consistent); and I know it's been mentioned in this thread, but utf8_decode does get misused a lot (read the RFC as to why). But I do not understand "Passing null to parameter # of type string is deprecated" specifically. I should note that the other coercion/type tweaks that G.B.P (Girgias) is suggesting, and has partially implemented, do make sense: https://github.com/Girgias/unify-typing-modes-rfc And (fortunately) NULL coercion still works when concatenating NULL to a string, adding NULL to an integer, NULL being treated as false, etc. One team of developers I know are still finding these issues well over a year later (they also introduce new code that trips it as well); two other teams specifically ignore this deprecation (far too many instances to "fix"), and one team is still to decide what they are going to do (annoyingly they are still using 7.4). Even Rector gives up and uses (string) $var for every variable that's a non-nullable string, which can result in thousands of changes in a project (that's for the ~434 function arguments being checked; personally I'd have only gone with 335 of the ~997): https://github.com/rectorphp/rector-src/blob/main/rules/Php81/Rector/FuncCall/NullToStrictStringFuncCallArgRector.php Anyway, when PHP 9.0 makes this a type error, in the ~85% of code that isn't using strict types, that's going to cause lots of random and unexpected problems. Craig PS: I drafted this RFC, but didn't continue due to the negativity (i.e. it would have been voted down, and then used to justify the type error): https://wiki.php.net/rfc/null_coercion_consistency