Editor’s Desk: PHP 7.4 RFCs, Symfony Speaker Workshop, Call for Writers

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The PHP 7.4 Release manager is Peter Kokot (congratulations). Derick Rethans has also volunteered to help out.

We have two RFCS that reduce boilerplate code which helps significantly when reading code

1. Generator Comprehensions RFC by Larry Garfield. A more compact way to write generators, very similar to python comprehensions and is Proposed for PHP 7.4. Sara Golemon has written a proof of concept for the feature, so some ground work is already laid.
2.  RFC Arrow Functions / Short Closures by Nikita Popov, Levi Morrison, and Bob Wenand. Proposed for PHP 7.4. to make anonymous functions in PHP less verbose. We’ve come a long way from PHP 4’s create_function function. It allows specifying parameter and return types, variadics, and anything else you can do in a regular method signature.

The RFC forSaner String to Number Comparisons aims to make weak type comparisons using == safer. Targeted for PHP 8.0, since it can break existing code. Basically, if a string doesn’t look like an int or float, don’t treat it as one. Zero and “foo” won’t be equal (as is now), same for 42 and “42foo”.

Roave/no-leaks adds memory leak detection to your PHPUnit testing suite.

According to W3techs.com about 33% of websites surveyed run WordPress. (Joomla and Drupal are the other top three.) They surveyed top 10 million websites provided by Alexa. WordPress 5.1.1 includes a security fix for a CSRF attack discovered by RIPstech. They exploited the fact no CSRF validation exists when a user posts a new comment.

The Symfony Diversity initiative’s speaker workshop webinar is set for March 24th, 2019 (this coming Sunday). Please go register to attend, and also help out by donating if you can. Listen to Episode 17 which includes an interview with Jill Binder and Lukas Smith to find out more about the initiative.

Call for Writers.

I’m always looking for writers for the magazine. If you are interested, I’ve added a form to submit article proposals. They are very similar to talk proposals, if you want to submit to speak at a conference consider submitting to write an article.. Unless I’m overwhelmed with submissions, I will try to respond with feedback to every submission I get.

php[tek] registration&

The advanced sale for php[tek] 2019 ends March 31st. Save $200 by registering before the end of the month. This year’s conference is an all-new format, with eight in-depth, focused tracks on web and PHP development topics.

Air date	March 18, 2019
Hosted by	Oscar Merida
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