Re: [PREVOTE] PHP Engine Constants

Hi Davey, Davey Shafik wrote:

A while back I brought a small RFC to internals, that proposed a set of constants that were specifically for alternative implementations to identify themselves as such if they want to conform to the spec. https://wiki.php.net/rfc/php_engine_constant There were some folks who didn't like it, but nobody suggested different implementations, just didn't feel it was necessary. As such, I'm planning to bring it to a vote next week - this is simply a heads up as it's been a while and I want to give a chance for any objections other than not wanting it to be voiced before I open it up for voting.

This is an interesting idea. Have you asked the HHVM team what they think about it? Their input is probably more important than ours, as the foremost alternative implementation. The implications of it are interesting. Currently, PHP doesn't really have any separation between the current version of the PHP interpreter and the version of the language. Despite the specification efforts, PHP versions are effectively defined by the main implementation. Would this RFC be changing that, decoupling the version of PHP, the language, from PHP, the interpreter? Would we no longer report the version of PHP as, say, “7.1.1”, but instead as just “7.1”, and put “7.1.1” as the engine version? The micro version, at least with the modern release process, is only meaningful for the PHP interpreter, and not other implementations. Also, isn't there a danger of code sniffing for the engine? I wouldn't be entirely surprised if, in future, HHVM might start pretending to be PHP by default. Anyway, that's just a few thoughts of mine. -- Andrea Faulds https://ajf.me/