Some things written during PHP 7 release _ PHP Tutorial

I wrote some things on PHP 7 release. It has been four or five years since the PHP 7 release. from the initial Yaf to PHP7 today, more and more projects are involved, and more users are using my code, something to say tomorrow when PHP 7 is released

I have been doing open source for 4 or 5 years. from the initial Yaf to PHP7 today, more and more projects are involved and more users are using my code, PHP7, which will be released tomorrow, is definitely one of the most important milestones since I started open source. I should remember today and let me feel a little bit more emotional.

The PHP7 project was started at the Spring Festival last year, when our PHP-5.5-based Opcache JIT project was largely shelved for failing to get the expected results, some of the information we collected when doing JIT makes us realize that the basic part is not good enough and it does not support JIT very well. so we started restructuring the project around February 2014, at that time, we hoped that through reconstruction, we could improve the performance by more than 30%, providing the foundation for further optimization in the future.

At that time, I didn't give a name for this project. we just tried it. those months were my busiest time, because only the two of us were in this project, I am also busy with my own Weibo work, so I spent most of my time at night. fortunately, I had a 5-hour time difference with another person, so a lot of work can be serialized.

As the project progressed, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the performance improvement was even greater than we thought. by April, another person had joined us, and most of the work had been done by May, so we published this achievement, named it the php ng project.

But what I did not expect is that we met a lot of resistance from the community, because when we secretly develop PHP NG, the community is also running a 64-bit support project initiated mainly by Microsoft's students. when we published php ng, they questioned that suddenly such a large Patch came out, no one else understands how to maintain it in the future, how to merge it with the 64-bit supported branch, and then oppose adopting the php ng branch. at that time, I was very frustrated. The long-lasting quarrel also made me very tired. In the end, I was unable to dispatch myself, and I did not care about my bad English, I sent back an e-mail in the contact group, asking everyone to cherish this performance improvement branch.

There is also a very interesting episode. There are a lot of php ng supporters and they are also very depressed about this quarrel. some supporters published such a news on the PHP official website one day: the http://php.net/archive/2014.php#id2014-05-27-1 writes: "When we aren't looking for pictures of kittens on the internet, internals developers are nearly always looking for ways to improve PHP, a few developers have a focus on performance. ", but the opponents said on the day that no, php ng has not been accepted and asked to delete this article. Fortunately, considering that the article has been published, finally, the entry of this article is removed on the homepage, but the content is retained in the archive. many media have seen this time.

After the dispute persists, we have to initiate a vote to decide whether to accept php ng. Fortunately, most people support the php ng project during the final vote, and decided to start the development of our new version of PHP based on php ng. at that time, I was not sure whether to use PHP6 or PHP7 (and later I decided to use PHP7 ). now I often talk about this experience, which makes me feel the pain of democracy ".

As you can see, in the last two years, new features, continuous performance improvement, and many unreasonable improvements have been added to PHP7, make PHP7 more and more plump. from the underlying ZVAL change to the scalar type prompt, from the initial 30% performance improvement to the current performance leap of more than 100%, every change is worth looking forward. then, after several reluctant jumps, it will be displayed in front of you.

Sometimes I will think, I am lucky. I have been lucky to have the opportunity to do things that have never been done and have challenges. Fortunately, I have been able to feel my own growth, and I am lucky to do most of my work, after all, I saw the effect and got a return. I sincerely hope that my luck will inspire more people to participate in open source.

In the future, we will continue to improve PHP performance, improve PHP quality, and allow more PHPer users to continue to enjoy transparent improvements.

Finally, this long history of open-source has brought me a lot of gains. I would like to thank you all for your encouragement, and thank you for your kindness.

PS: I wanted to wait until PHP 7 is released, but I thought it could make a fortune for it, so I should release it first. PHP 7 is available for download now. the official announcement is that we will check it the next morning considering the time difference. currently: http://php.net/get/php-7.0.0.tar.gz/from/a/mirror enjoy!

When PHP7 was released, there were 4 open-source projects. Five years later, from the initial Yaf to PHP7 today, more and more projects were involved, more and more users are using my code. tomorrow...