PHP 7.4 Alpha Released With FFI Extension, Preloading Opcache For Better Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: PHP 7.4 Alpha Released With FFI Extension, Preloading Opcache For Better Performance

The first alpha release of PHP 7.4 is now available ahead of its feature freeze next month and after a period of betas and release candidates will culminate with the official PHP 7.4.0 release around the end of November...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PHP-7.4-Alpha-1-Released

[CochainComplex]

This is good news ...Nextcloud then should be a bit more snappy out of the box. Not only with some opcache tweaks and redis file locking.

[boxie]

hrm... golang can build a c library... maybe I can finally combine these two

[Vistaus]

uid313 Any thoughts?

[uid313]

uid313 Any thoughts?

The FFI is rather uninteresting, it has slower performance than interpreted PHP code and I don't really find it any interesting.

The standard library of PHP remains rather shitty with methods being named inconsistently, some not throwing exceptions, some returning weird things such as -1 on errors, etc.
The language still does not support async/await such as many other languages like C#, Python and JavaScript just to name a few.

That said, I like the direction PHP is going and PHP 8 looks to be a great release. It will feature optional typing on class properties which is really nice. So the typing system is improving which should result in the ability to create more robust applications.

[chilinux]

I really wish to see better sandboxing in PHP.

So many popular PHP applications have plugin or skin extensions were either an intentional or unintentional issue were it gets all the same permissions as the primary PHP application it extends. I would like to be able to replace the include or require calls with a restricted_include or restricted_require that take not just the filename to be loaded but a list of functions. Then if a function inside that file makes a function call outside of the provided manifest, PHP should throw an error.

As it stands, it seems like the PHP engine does very little to set any sort of restrictions on the scope that these plugins can access. But the idea that people can simply audit every single plugin code has clearly failed.

[Tuxee]

I really wish to see better sandboxing in PHP.

So many popular PHP applications have plugin or skin extensions were either an intentional or unintentional issue were it gets all the same permissions as the primary PHP application it extends. I would like to be able to replace the include or require calls with a restricted_include or restricted_require that take not just the filename to be loaded but a list of functions. Then if a function inside that file makes a function call outside of the provided manifest, PHP should throw an error.

As it stands, it seems like the PHP engine does very little to set any sort of restrictions on the scope that these plugins can access. But the idea that people can simply audit every single plugin code has clearly failed.

Really? You declare all "native" functions this include should be able to access? These lists might get huge. Really huge. How man array functions 10, 20, 50? Throw in another 50 string functions. It needs to read some configuration? How many file functions will you allow?
As for application specific functions: We have arrived in the OOP era and scoping is available.