Hello world, it's Wednesday, July 22, 2026, and here's what happened This Week in PHP Internals.

20 stories this week, so let's get into it. *But first,* This week's episode is brought to you by **Tideways**. Slow requests, and no clear reason why? Tideways helps you understand exactly where your PHP application spends its time — profiling, tracing, and monitoring to find and fix bottlenecks **faster**. And your profiling data stays hosted in Germany — GDPR-friendly by default. Learn more at `tideways.com`.

This week's top story: the season's first ballots are open — 2 sets of them — and the early counts are lopsided. Tim Düsterhus opened voting on the `Time\Duration` class on Friday with 2 ballots: a primary, needing a 2/3 majority, and a secondary choosing between full and abbreviated method names. As of recording, the primary stands at **23 to 1**, and full names lead 18 to 1 — so `multiplyBy` and `divideBy`, not `mul` and `divBy`. Voting closes July 31. And remember Pierre Joye, who last week was leaning no over `fromSeconds()` and its capped nanoseconds argument? This week he closed the loop and voted **yes**, writing: "We were like ships passing in the night for some of my disagreements. The RFC wiki page did not show the additional constructor for other units, which hence the inconsistency I pointed out for the extra [nanoseconds] argument in fromSecond. They are here, and reduce this down to a lower level of bad APIs, more a pragmatic compromise conciliating different (if not numerous) use cases. Anything can be perfect, or shipped. Choose one." It turns out the per-unit constructors that resolved his objection had been in the RFC all along. His ballot almost didn't register, though — each vote on the wiki is a separate form, and Tim had to point out that you submit each one individually. The count now includes him.

Before the ballots opened, the `Duration` thread picked up a subplot about PHP 9. Holly Schilling — who wrote the class-extensions RFCs we covered last week — announced she's drafting a **Value Structs** proposal for after the `8.6` window, and argued that `Duration` would make a better struct than a class, with both ideally landing together in PHP 9. Ilija Tovilo replied by linking his own existing `structs-v2` draft and asking whether she was aware of it. She was — she'd read it before drafting her own, and diverged from it on purpose, keeping mutating and non-mutating functionality separate. Tim saw no reason to wait on any of this, saying a draft-stage idea "will take an unknown duration to land - if it ever happens" — *his pun, not mine* — and that improvements to the standard library shouldn't queue behind it.

The week's other live vote came from Eric Norris, who opened balloting Thursday on **minimum supported versions** for PHP `8.6` — also with 2 questions, each needing a 2/3 vote. Requiring autoconf `2.71` for builds from git stands at 20 to 3 with 4 abstentions. Requiring `COM_RESET_CONNECTION` — which sets a floor of MySQL `5.7.3` or MariaDB `10.2.4`, so persistent connections actually get reset — stands at **21 to nothing** with 3 abstentions. Alexander Kurilo arrived after the discussion phase to ask for an opt-in instead, warning that on older databases persistent connections will silently turn non-persistent. Eric noted: "MySQL 5.7.3 is at least a decade old; it was released on December 3rd, 2013." After walking through every opt-out design he could think of, he concluded the right move is to make the correct behavior the default. The 3 no votes on autoconf include Jakub Zelenka, who's worried about building on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and 9 — Tim offered to delay that particular merge to early `8.7`. Both votes close July 30.

Saturday night, Pierre Joye opened the RFC that grew out of the libgd sync we covered last week: **`gd` 2.4**. It's big — 3 pillars. First, syncing the bundled `gd` extension with upstream libgd: new codecs like QOI, JPEG XL, and UltraHDR, animated GIF and WebP support, multi-page TIFF, and real metadata handling. Second, an additive object-oriented `Gd\` API — codecs with `fromFile()` and `toStream()`, immutable image info, streaming readers and writers. Third, a brand-new **2D vector canvas** built on FreeType's rasterizer, with gradients and the full Cairo compositing set. He says the implementation is nearly done, including a security audit. He declared discussion open for 14 days, until August 1 — and that one sentence is where the trouble started.

Because August 1 plus a 14-day vote lands *after* the deadline. Release manager Matteo Beccati was gentle about it, writing: "As much as I like this RFC, I'm afraid it came in a little too late." Jakub Zelenka explained that nobody — release managers included — has the authority to grant an exception; that would take a change to the policy itself. And Rowan Tommins did the arithmetic: with alpha 1 out July 2, the cutoff for an RFC's final state was July 14, which is 4 days before this thread even opened. Pierre's frustration has a specific shape. The implementation was finished weeks ago — what delayed everything was that his pull request sat waiting on an approval that had been assigned to an automated bot reviewer, so no human was ever going to sign off, and he eventually merged it himself. He also argues the stakes are real, because PHP 9 is the one chance to change old defaults, and missing this window locks the current design in for years. The thread got tense over tone along the way — Pierre felt brushed off by a terse reply, and Rowan apologized outright, then made the counter-case that a fixed cutoff applied to everyone is fairer than debating each RFC's merits one at a time. All of this landed the same day Larry Garfield asked the list, in a separate thread, to hold new business until September 1 so reviewers can focus on `8.6`'s finish line. So `gd` 2.4 is alive and under discussion — just aimed at the *next* release, whatever its number turns out to be.

Caleb White's pipe assignment operator, `|>=`, had a crowded week. Larry Garfield opened it unable to find a compelling use case, and by Monday had moved to a no — pushed there, he says, by a competing proposal. That competing proposal is Vadim Dvorovenko's **left-to-right assignment** RFC, published Sunday, which claims the *same* `|>=` token with opposite semantics. Vadim objects on principle, arguing: "Attempting to transform such an operator from an immutable, functional construct into a mutable, imperative one steers the language in the wrong direction and undoes previous efforts." Caleb declined to merge the proposals, noting that F#, Elixir, OCaml, and Hack all kept ordinary assignment alongside their pipes. Larry also claimed none of the pipe proposals could make `8.6`, and Tim Düsterhus corrected him, asserting: "This is false" — the last major change was July 13, so voting could open July 27 and close August 10, before the freeze. Meanwhile Bob Weinand asked whether the desugaring double-fires property hooks. Caleb came back with tests showing `|>=` behaves exactly like `??=`, and updated the RFC's single-evaluation section to match. Vadim's own RFC, as of recording, has **0** replies.

Paul M. Jones's `strict-namespace` RFC — the piece he carved out of function autoloading last Tuesday night — spent its first full week in one long argument about a single word. Rowan Tommins objected first, writing that strict "implies some extra check that namespaces are [correct] in some way, which isn't really what this is about." Ilija Tovilo went deeper, arguing: "the value-add of this declaration is very small if the plan isn't ever to deprecate/remove the old behavior." Tim Düsterhus is **in favor** — with a rename to `global_fallback=0`. By Friday Paul had 4 candidate names on the table and a diagnosis: the pushback is the name, not the feature. Theodore Brown pointed out he'd floated the same directive in 2019; Paul added it to the prior art with an apology. And Benjamin Außenhofer suggested splitting the ballot — vote the concept, then vote the name. Rowan warned against it, writing: "a split vote leaves voters who actively dislike a particular name with an awkward choice: vote Yes, and risk the [bad] name being chosen; or vote No, even though you would support the feature under a different name." The rest of the autoloading corner kept moving too: Paul updated **function autoloading** mark 5 to lean on the new RFC and wants its vote open in about 2 weeks, and Michael Morris's improved-autoloading draft drew warm-but-firm feedback from Larry Garfield and Rowan Tommins — both like the namespace-setup-file idea, neither wants it crammed into the class autoloader's callback.

Nicolas Grekas didn't let Ilija Tovilo's "sadly not in favor" be the last word on **serializable closures**. His rebuttal: caching one attribute isn't the point — the point is skipping the *entire* metadata pipeline that frameworks re-run on every request, and that's the measured slow path. On the security design, he refused to loosen it, writing: "Name-based closure unserialization would ship a universal, app-independent gadget in the engine ... I won't commit to an RFC that turns every serialized payload into that kind of gadget, and I don't think we should, either." Then Saturday brought version `0.3`, and a surgical cut — the reflection API is gone, the `serialize()` support stays. His reasoning: "serialize() is the one feature that most/all cache systems are built on, so that's the place that needs the improvement." Fresh reviews welcome.

Wendell Adriel came back to the list Thursday proposing **typed array declarations** — `array<int, string>` as real syntax, with 3 escalating enforcement levels. The review was fast and unsparing. Lazare Inepologlou flagged that you can't soundly subtype a mutable array without splitting reads from writes, and Wendell shipped a revised draft the *next day*. Rob Landers warned the whole thing overlaps the reified generics work, on hold until after the freeze, which is late August at the earliest. Rowan Tommins noted that level 1 — syntax without enforcement — rhymes with the bound-erased generics RFC the list just declined. Michał Marcin Brzuchalski even found a runtime hole, where functions like `parse_str()` that build results directly into a typed property can dodge the check. By Monday, Wendell put the RFC on hold himself. Larry Garfield's verdict was the sharpest, calling this "the already-dangerously-overloaded array mega-type" and asking for real typed list, set, and dictionary objects instead — which Wendell promptly volunteered to assist in building.

The frozen **deprecations** list for PHP `8.6` got its evidence file. Juliette Reinders Folmer scanned the Packagist Top 4-thousand — nearly four hundred fifty thousand files — and posted counts for every proposal. The headline **being**: `list()` appears over **twelve thousand** times, and Juliette wrote plainly: "Having said that, I'm definitely not in favour of deprecating list()." Compare `spl_object_hash()` at 625, `is_integer()` at 303, and a long tail of single and double digits — several proposals scored a clean 0. Kamil Tekiela discovered his mysqli proposal had missed the procedural `mysqli_stmt_init()`, patched the text, and worried aloud: "I hope this change is not going to reset the counter." Tim Düsterhus was quick to correct the record downward — one scary-looking count, on `_` as a constant, collapses to 0 once false positives come out. And Monday, right on schedule, Gina P. Banyard confirmed the timetable, writing: "I intend to open the vote next Monday (the 27th of July) for 2 weeks so that the vote is finished on time for 8.6." Every deprecation gets voted in isolation — bring a lunch.

Quick hits. Go Kudo returned with a rebuilt cache proposal — a bundled `user_cache` extension, fully decoupled from OPcache this time; Larry Garfield likes it, flagged the lock story around `remember()`, and gently redirected it to `8.7` — adding: "Or 9, if that's what we call it." Holly Schilling's **4x** fix for non-public asymmetric setters got its answer: no RFC needed — Tim confirmed a pure performance improvement just needs PR review, and Ilia Alshanetsky called it "definitely a strong candidate for PHP 8.6 inclusion." **fennic** pitched engine-native PSR-4 autoloading with `spl_autoload_psr4_register()`; Alex Rock wants classmap support before it can replace Composer's bootstrap, and Heinz Wiesinger pointed to his existing PECL extension doing much the same. Edmond of the TrueAsync project published a pre-RFC for an **async scheduler** engine interface — coroutine-aware core, no scheduler in core itself. His philosophical problem is that the RFC has *no* user-visible changes at all, and so far it has 0 replies. And Osama Aldemeery asked for RFC karma to formalize `PREG_THROW_ON_ERROR` — Ilija Tovilo granted it **2 minutes** later.

Liam Hammett's markup expressions thread sprouted an alternative: Edmond proposed making the *parser* extensible instead, so JSX-like syntaxes could ship as extensions — Morgan liked that better than blessing one syntax, and within a day Edmond had a working DSL-hooks prototype, announcing: "Your wish has been granted. 🙂" Máté Kocsis and Ignace Nyamagana Butera kept refining **query parameters** — the open question is whether parsing limits belong on builder methods too, with Ignace arguing PHP shouldn't police what's really a business constraint. Prateek Bhujel's terminal-helpers extension hit `0.6.0` — it's now installable via PIE, and its output methods now write to standard PHP streams like STDOUT and STDERR instead of only its own built-in targets. The ballot queue grew by 2: Nick Sdot posted intent to vote on **readonly property defaults** for on or around July 23, and Khaled Alam's const-object-property-write opens Saturday the 25th — both aiming ahead of the freeze. Ben Ramsey amended the **Working Groups** RFC with a new section setting expectations for charter-RFC discussion. And release week: PHP `8.6.0alpha2`, `8.5.9RC1`, and `8.4.24RC1` all shipped — with alpha 3 and both GA releases converging on July 30 — while the release managers posted the countdown that framed half of this episode: soft feature freeze August 11, beta 1 August 13, every `8.6` vote closed before then.

So that's the week: 2 ballot boxes open and both lopsided — `Duration` cruising at 23 to 1, minimum versions right behind it; `gd` 2.4 arriving 4 days after the door closed and pointing at the next release instead; a pipe operator with 2 authors claiming 1 token; typed arrays proposed, revised, and shelved inside 5 days; and the deprecations list armed with its evidence file, ballots opening Monday — with readonly defaults and const-property-write queued right behind. Links to every thread are below. Thanks again to `Tideways.com` for supporting this week's episode. We're Artisan Build. See you next week.


This Week In PHP Internals | July 22, 2026