Re: Revisiting case-sensitivity in PHP

I'm no one important, but I just want to say for the sake of the public image of PHP I hope this does not pass, or at least not in the foreseeable future. There are NO substantial gains to speak of here and the BC break is real and it's super annoying when they pile up and up. Besides, this is slightly off topic, but I don't know if you know, but if you take a look at stackoverflow developer survey over the years, there has been an absolute 30% drop of php popularity in the past few years. I would guess this is mostly the low-level developers not being fans of the language removing magic quotes and other "super useful" features. In other words, PHP lost the average joe as its target audience. Joe's gone. Just my 2¢: a) this WAS the reason PHP was great and I loved to rewrite the systems of several very successful companies who started out with their non-technical founders who coded their way out of the box to begin multi-million businesses b) the PHP core and co. (a.k.a. YOU) should be acutely aware that the language needs to be liked by not only you, dear awesome lovely hardcore nerds, but also the users who just need to get stuff done, business needs fulfilled. I know this is not how YOU work, but if you ignore that part of the language users, there might eventually not be a language to work on in the future. So please, keep the language loose, I hate the slight inconsistency too, but if we ruin the day for another 20% of users, it might even be the straw that broke the camel's back. On Fri, 14 Jun 2024 at 02:38, Valentin Udaltsov <udaltsov.valentin@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Friday, 14 June, 2024 г. at 00:04, Timo Tijhof <ttijhof@wikimedia.org> wrote: >> >> Would this affect unserialize()? >> >> I ask because MediaWiki's main "text" database table is an >> immutable/append-only store where we store the text of each page revision since ~2004. It is stored >> as serialised blobs of a value class. There have been a number of different implementations over the >> past twenty years of Wikipedia's existence (plain text, gzip-compressed, diff-compressed, >> etc.). >> >> When we adopted modern autoloading in MediaWiki, we quickly found that blobs originally >> serialized by PHP 4 actually encoded the class in lowercase, regardless of the casing in source >> code. >> >> From https://3v4l.org/jl0et: >>> >>> class ConcatenatedGzipHistoryBlob {…} >>> print serialize($blob); >>> # PHP 4.x: O:27:"concatenatedgziphistoryblob":… >>> # PHP 5/7/8: O:27:"ConcatenatedGzipHistoryBlob":… >> >> >> It is of course the application's responsibility to load these classes, but, it is >> arguably PHP's responsiblity to be able to construct what it serialized. I suppose anything is >> possible when announced as a breaking change for PHP 9.0. I wanted to share this as something to >> take into consideration as part of the impact. Potentially worthy of additional communicating, or >> perhaps worth supporting separately. >> >> -- >> Timo Tijhof, >> Principal Engineer, >> Wikimedia Foundation. >> https://timotijhof.net/ >> > > Hi, Timo! > > Thank you very much for bringing up this important case. > > Here's how I see this. If PHP gets class case-sensitivity, unserialization of classes with > lowercase names will fail. This is because the engine will start putting > MyClass class entry with key MyClass > (not myclass) into the loaded classes table and serialization will > not be able to find it as myclass. > Even if some deprecation layer is introduced (that puts both > myclass and MyClass keys into the > table), you will first have a ton of notices and then eventually end up with the same problem, when > transition to case sensitivity is complete. Hence I propose no deprecation layer — it does not > really help. > > However, you will be able to use class_alias() to solve your > issue. If classes are case-sensitive, class_alias(MyClass::class, > 'myclass'); should work, since MyClass != myclass anymore. And > serialization works perfectly with class aliases, see > https://3v4l.org/1n1as . > > -- > Valentin Udaltsov >