Tag: php56

I'm working on a project at the moment (a PHP library for CouchDB, if you must know) that is designed to make HTTP calls and therefore holds a Guzzle HTTPClient object as an object property. This is great except when I need to debug something and the output of my call to var_dump() is several screens high ...

A while ago I did some benchmarks on how different versions of PHP perform in comparison to one another. This isn't a performance measure in absolute terms, this was just benchmarking them all on the same laptop while it wasn't doing anything else, and averaging the time it took to run the benchmark script.

Recently I ran it again for versions PHP 5.3 through PHP 5.6 and I thought I'd share my results:

We have a couple of new features coming in to PHP 5.6 with names that sound much less exciting than the features they actually represent: "variadic functions" sound positively academic, and "argument unpacking" isn't exactly catchy. However they both use a new operator in PHP which looks like an elipsis (three dots ...) and is referred to as either the splat operator or the scatter operator. I included them in a recent version of my "Upgrading PHP" talk so I thought I'd share the examples here too in case anyone is interested.