Weekly update – 29 November 2024?

[ryan]

It’s been a fairly quiet week here at the ProcessWire HQ as it’s a Thanksgiving week where the kids don’t have school, which means less time in the office. This is the time of year when we think about what we’re thankful for, and I’m especially thankful for all of you and the ProcessWire community. 

Even with the holiday week, work continues on our next main/master version of ProcessWire. This week Bernhard and Adrian identified that ProcessWire doesn’t work well with PHP 8.4 due to some new deprecations introduced by this version of PHP. It’s a technical detail, but PHP 8.4+ wants a question mark before function/method arguments of named types that have a default value of null. So if the function arguments were (PageArray $items = null) PHP 8.4 wants it to be (?PageArray $items = null). 

Why? Who knows, perhaps not even PHP does, as “?” points directly to it being a question, one with no obvious answer. Perhaps it wants to make sure we really meant what we wrote, so the “?” is an “are you sure?”. Without question, the “= null” part is a pretty clear statement about what the intention is, no? I question the question mark, doesn’t this turn arguments into questions? Questionable arguments?

Being so close to a new master/main version, there’s no question that we want to make sure it works with the latest available PHP version, questionable or not. So that meant adding new questions to 72 different core files, which you’ll find on the dev branch this week. There may be more questions yet to answer, but those are the instances I was able to find so far. There’s a tradeoff in that the questions were introduced by PHP 7.1, so it’ll produce a parse error on any prior versions of PHP. Meaning, our minimum required PHP version is now 7.1. Prior to today, it was 7.0 (actually, PW still even worked even on PHP 5.6, not that it matters). Similar questions will have to be added to modules before they are PHP 8.4 compatible to not throw deprecation notices, so I’ll be making some questionable updates to Pro and public modules in the coming weeks as well. Thanks for putting up with all my questions and have a great weekend! Please reply with your questions below. 

[adrian]

Thanks Ryan for your hard work getting things ready for 8.4. 

While I see your frustration with PHP's change here, and appreciate your humorous commentary, I do actually think it makes sense when you consider that null is not a string or an array or some PW object, so there needs to be some way to explicitly state that null is an allowed option, rather than implicitly allowing it, which is exactly what the error states: "Implicitly marking parameter $var as nullable is deprecated".

I actually think I prefer the use of union types, eg: (PageArray|null $items = null) rather than the obscure question mark, but as we figured out, that requires PHP 8.

Anyway, thanks again for getting this implemented so very quickly so we can all start proper testing of 8.4 with our projects.

[FireWire]

?I've ?been ?type ?hinting ?parameters ?with ?question ?marks ?for ?so ?long ?I ?don't ?even ?see ?them ?anymore.

@ryan Seconding @adrian's many thanks for the PHP 8.4 attention 🙌

Will we see any (Disjunctive|Normal)|(Form&Types) type declarations?

Maybe a contest for longest function signature¿

Wait, did I just break my key¿

[Kiwi Chris]

As someone who writes about as much C# as PHP, ? to indicate nullable parameters is familiar, although if they'd put the ? after the parameter type, it would have meant not having to remember a different position depending on language. At least we don't have to put another upside down question mark at the end of the parameter, for probably the majority of us who don't have Spanish keyboards. 🙂