Revisiting case-sensitivity in PHP

> On Fri, Jun 14, 2024 at 6:40 AM Rokas Šleinius <raveren@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> I'm no one important, but I just want to say for the sake of the >> public image of PHP I hope this does not pass, or at least not in the >> foreseeable future. >> >> There are NO substantial gains to speak of here and the BC break is >> real and it's super annoying when they pile up and up. >> >> Besides, this is slightly off topic, but I don't know if you know, but >> if you take a look at stackoverflow developer survey over the years, >> there has been an absolute 30% drop of php popularity in the past few >> years. >> >> I would guess this is mostly the low-level developers not being fans >> of the language removing magic quotes and other "super useful" >> features. In other words, PHP lost the average joe as its target >> audience. Joe's gone. >> >> Just my 2¢: >> a) this WAS the reason PHP was great and I loved to rewrite the >> systems of several very successful companies who started out with >> their non-technical founders who coded their way out of the box to >> begin multi-million businesses >> b) the PHP core and co. (a.k.a. YOU) should be acutely aware that the >> language needs to be liked by not only you, dear awesome lovely >> hardcore nerds, but also the users who just need to get stuff done, >> business needs fulfilled. >> >> I know this is not how YOU work, but if you ignore that part of the >> language users, there might eventually not be a language to work on in >> the future. >> >> So please, keep the language loose, I hate the slight inconsistency >> too, but if we ruin the day for another 20% of users, it might even be >> the straw that broke the camel's back. >> >> On Fri, 14 Jun 2024 at 02:38, Valentin Udaltsov >> <udaltsov.valentin@gmail.com> wrote: >> > >> > On Friday, 14 June, 2024 г. at 00:04, Timo Tijhof <ttijhof@wikimedia.org> wrote: >> >> >> >> Would this affect unserialize()? >> >> >> >> I ask because MediaWiki's main "text" database table is an immutable/append-only store where we store the text of each page revision since ~2004. It is stored as serialised blobs of a value class. There have been a number of different implementations over the past twenty years of Wikipedia's existence (plain text, gzip-compressed, diff-compressed, etc.). >> >> >> >> When we adopted modern autoloading in MediaWiki, we quickly found that blobs originally serialized by PHP 4 actually encoded the class in lowercase, regardless of the casing in source code. >> >> >> >> From https://3v4l.org/jl0et: >> >>> >> >>> class ConcatenatedGzipHistoryBlob {…} >> >>> print serialize($blob); >> >>> # PHP 4.x: O:27:"concatenatedgziphistoryblob":… >> >>> # PHP 5/7/8: O:27:"ConcatenatedGzipHistoryBlob":… >> >> >> >> >> >> It is of course the application's responsibility to load these classes, but, it is arguably PHP's responsiblity to be able to construct what it serialized. I suppose anything is possible when announced as a breaking change for PHP 9.0. I wanted to share this as something to take into consideration as part of the impact. Potentially worthy of additional communicating, or perhaps worth supporting separately. >> >> >> >> -- >> >> Timo Tijhof, >> >> Principal Engineer, >> >> Wikimedia Foundation. >> >> https://timotijhof.net/ >> >> >> > >> > Hi, Timo! >> > >> > Thank you very much for bringing up this important case. >> > >> > Here's how I see this. If PHP gets class case-sensitivity, unserialization of classes with lowercase names will fail. This is because the engine will start putting `MyClass` class entry with key `MyClass` (not `myclass`) into the loaded classes table and serialization will not be able to find it as `myclass`. >> > Even if some deprecation layer is introduced (that puts both `myclass` and `MyClass` keys into the table), you will first have a ton of notices and then eventually end up with the same problem, when transition to case sensitivity is complete. Hence I propose no deprecation layer — it does not really help. >> > >> > However, you will be able to use `class_alias()` to solve your issue. If classes are case-sensitive, `class_alias(MyClass::class, 'myclass');` should work, since MyClass != myclass anymore. And serialization works perfectly with class aliases, see https://3v4l.org/1n1as . >> > >> > -- >> > Valentin Udaltsov >> > > > Hey Rokas, > > Please bottom post (it's the rules), but PHP's "decline" has little to > do with the language itself, most likely it has to do with how long > people have been coding. >42% of people have been programming less > than 9 years, and >62% for less than 14. "Hyped up" languages tend to > dominate in the earlier years of programming and even then, most of > the developers responding to that survey classify themselves as > "full-stack" (and from talking to "full-stack" developers, it mostly > tends to mean they know Javascript -- which lo-and-behold, is the top > language; surprise surprise). > > I wouldn't put too much weight on that survey since it is clearly > biased towards early-career devs, in the US, who know Javascript. > Fortunately, the industry is much bigger than that. > > Robert Landers > Software Engineer > Utrecht NL