78: PHP Internals catch-up with Joe Watkins

On this weeks show we are lucky to be joined by recurring guest and friend of the show Joe Watkins. We start of discussion with the upcoming PHP 7 release, reasoning behind why it has been postponed, the bright future of adoption to the release compared to previous versions and how the release gets packaged up for different distributions. We then move on to touch upon uopz (User Operations for Zend), how it helps aid getting code ‘under-test’ and the progress made to make it compatible with PHP 7. The pthreads polyfill and work on a new project called ‘inspector’ are next on the list, with the history behind how inspector started from the concept of serialising functions/closures. Finally, we chat about the recent APCu events and additions, highlighting different forms of locking in the process - followed by what interesting topics he wishes to explore in the future.