55: Concurrency, Strict type-hinting and PHP 7 with Joe Watkins

This week we are lucky to be joined by Joe Watkins, for a general catch-up on a host of PHP-related topics. We start the show off talking about his newly created blog and what drew him to start writing. Following this, we touch upon his first proposed talk on ‘Parallel PHP’ - hoping to resolve some of the confusion around concurrent terminology and patterns. We then mention his experience looking at YouTube Vitess (for MySQL scaling), and the pros and cons of the team deciding to use Go. His work on strict parameter type-hints is then discussed, along with how the idea has changed over time to be a little less strict. We then highlight the awesome work that Nikic has done for the PHP community, along with his most recent article on the improvements made to PHP’s hash-table implementation. PHP 7 and the proposed 5.7 release are then touched upon, followed by the speedy Unicode String implementation. Finally, we discuss the common perception of fear around compiling PHP from source, along with the differences between static and shared libraries.