97: RFC Showdown for PHP 7.1 with Joe Watkins

In this episode we are joined by Joe Watkins to discuss the many RFC’s that are in contention to be approved for PHP 7.1. We start off with a congratulations to Joe for his first PHP Release Manager position, highlighting what the role entails and how it is going. We then discuss the RFC process and how there has been a lot of activity over the past couple of weeks within this space. The concept of ‘Null’ is the first group of RFC’s we discuss, followed by union/intersection types and the pipe operator. We then move on to chat about short closure syntax, functional interfaces and lexical scope within anonymous classes. Finally, we bring up the comparable RFC which has been around for many years and the benefits of having attributes within the language.