It’s not a big addition, but it’s a welcome one
Wow, the PHP train doesn’t stop, does it? There was one RFC (Request for Comments) for a new capability of the PHP language itself that closed voting just recently, and it’s called never.
PHP 8.1 is planned for the end of the year, and in addition to Fibers, the new never keyword will allow you to mark a function as “never” returning. The function will stop the normal script execution by either throwing an exception, looping forever, or simply telling PHP to stop with die().
Using the New “never”
The best way to show why the never return type should make sense is with…
Maximum performance doesn’t come without code changes
Laravel Octane was announced some weeks ago with the promise of pushing the framework to the moon in terms of requests served per second. It wasn’t public until today (in beta form) for everyone to test, with first-party Laravel package compatibility (e.g. Nova or Telescope) out of the box.
The way Laravel Octane works to push the boundaries is essentially simple: Instead of “starting” the application each request, it does it fully once and saves it into a shared part of the memory. Once done, Octane will spawn multiple PHP workers that will receive this shared application instance. …
Understand how it works and what it means for concurrency’s future in PHP
PHP is trying to shove the lack of features from its code base, and Fibers is one of the meaningful additions to the language. PHP Fibers, incoming in PHP 8.1 at the end of the year, will introduce a sort of async programming (coroutines) into the wild.
The fiber concept basically refers to a lightweight thread of execution (also called coroutine). These seem to run in parallel but are ultimately handled by the runtime itself rather than by pushing it directly to the CPU. …
There is no thing as “bad products”, but wrong prices
I’ll save you the introduction by just pointing that Artifact was a disappointment from the very announcement, and was kept a disappointment until its death.
Nobody asked for card game being announced with so much fanfare, and to be forced as the next “big” thing for Valve. To add insult to injury, the pricing scheme also proved that nobody wanted Artifact either.
Whoever thought that Artifact was gonna be a success was tone deaf with the gaming industry, specially the players. …
What holds tomorrow’s technology for an old language is not up to date?
Almost exactly one year ago I published an article that titled itself “PHP could fade away in the next decade”. The summary of the article I published is like a A Christmas Carol, but instead of Ebenezer Scrooge, it’s PHP:
- In the past, PHP didn’t fix its problems, so other languages gained traction.
- In the present, PHP lacks features needed for the Internet of today.
- In the future, PHP still won’t have meaningful features.
Note that I never wrote “dying”, “don’t use it”, or even “ditch your PHP project now!”. …
There is no worse deaf man than the one who doesn’t want to hear. And there is no worse madman than the one who doesn’t want to understand.
The only “bastion of hope” among all publishers. The “chosen one” that would destroy corporate greed. The only company that showed that being good with its customers would allow for reciprocity and truly become successful. CD Projekt.
The polish company was considered one of the best around for their talent, commitment, pro-consumer policies. Anyone remembers the “free DLC” mantra for The Witcher 3, and the no-DRM approach on GOG. No lying, no nickel-and-dime gamers, just good and honest products.
They were considered the good guys for almost a decade and half, but now reality hits: they’re just another greedy company…
And why you should just buy a console and an iPad
One of the key parts of any PC “Gamer” is the graphics card. A decade ago there was a good price point between USD $200 and $400, at most. Now, you’re just picking what console to buy instead.
You can call me a mad, crazy, or literally ignorant, but there are many facts that suggest the “PC Gaming” as we knew it is dead, being relegated to an afterthought or a clearly highly enthusiast market. No more sweet-pricing deals, no more games pushing the boundaries, PCs components for games have moved to luxuries.
Graphic cards for games became a niche
The “cryptocurrencies armageddon” made graphic cards higher…
The ball just went out of their court
Just as Apple killed the aging PowerPC architecture from mainstream by migrating to Intel x86 powered chips, the Cupertino based company is doing it again in favour of ARM.
The once considered leader of x86, Intel, slept on the job for a decade. You wanted performance, you would go over x86. No more.
The 40-old architecture didn’t show its age until Apple invested highly on ARM by buying PA Semi in 2008, the same folks that gave some light to PowerPC after it went “open” bacause IBM was already out of ideas. From there, the company made iPhone chips powerhouses…
I couldn’t resist the temptation to pick Go and see how it’s different from PHP and Rust
After this comment in my last article, I had a mild realization when checking my options: I wasn’t considering the Go language in all of this.
Both languages, Rust and Go, appeared almost at the same time, but their focus is kind of… different. While Rust offers “C++ done right”, exposes manual control almost everywhere and close-to-the-metal performance, Go says that for some tasks you don’t need to go THAT deep as long you’re fine with sharing a little of latency for the garbage collector it includes.
Loris Cro simplifies the performance comparison in a nice catchy phrase:
Go is…
A strictly typed language like Rust as a lot of differences.
This is a series of blog post where I document my transition from PHP, an interpreted language, to Rust, a system programming language, while exploring some paradigm differences between both as a long-standing PHP developer.
Articles in this series:
When entering the Rust world you will instantly know that is not some quick and basic language. It really is different from dynamically typed languages which are very easy to pick up and program for. Rust wants…
