40: News on PHP 7, and how PHP internally works with Joe Watkins

In this weeks show we are very lucky to have Joe Watkins on again to discuss all things PHP 7. Starting off with the decisions behind calling the next release 7, we delve into the reasons for 6 being abandoned. Moving on from this we look into what PHP 7 currently has scheduled to offer, including the PHPNG patch, an AST and maybe Joe’s own Unicode String class. We then discuss how a PHP script is internally lexed, parsed/compiled and cached, - including how a JIT would speed up certain use-cases. Finally we touch upon the much requested String type hinting and how a solution similar to Java’s could be implemented with minimal hassle.