2008 Lookback

It's been a helluva year... No, seriously, it's been... unique.

Last January, I started off the year with a presentation at geekSessions-1.3, along with some associated "hanging-out" in San Francisco (a city I normally avoid, because I dislike large crowds of people). I also got a brand new insulin pump to replace the seven year old beast who's LCD display had finally died. The pump itself didn't die (kudos to Medtronic for that), just the display. I've enjoyed my new "pocket pancreas" about as much as the old one, though of course the incremental improvements to its design haven't gone unappreciated.

February was a fairly quiet month for me professionally. A mixup in some of my medications (not related to the new pump), left me really distracted and irritable. The medications have been sorted, but I got to like the fear I induced in my coworker's eyes to the point that I keep up the show for appearances sake. :)

March was a flurry of activity getting things sorted at home and at work so that I could take a much needed month off in April. This month would ultimately turn into a mere three weeks since I refuse to relax, but it was time well spent anyway. During March I met two new friends who I've since come to appreciate deeply, and in April I got to spend a lot of time with my grandma; Something I do far too little of.

May saw the launch of Yahoo! Search Monkey move into full swing, bringing a lot of time and effort by the entire Search team along with it. As part of the launch, we held a developer event in Sunnyvale, and I learned that if you blog long and hard enough, random strangers will eventually show you naked pictures of themselves.

June was a hard month to handle. My wife of more than 10 years got herself a 1 bedroom apartment and moved out. We're both feeling the repercussions of that, and while reconciliation is a possibility, we really haven't fixed any of the things were wrong with our relationship. See, we're just as F-ed up as a straight couple, but with twice the estrogen! It was also at this time that my grandfather's cancer took a turn for the worse and he found himself spending a great deal of time in ICU. His children and grandchildren did their best to avoid feeling useless as we waited outside him room, not sure if he was going to pull out of it...

In July, my grandfather was feeling good enough that we threw a small party for my cousin's graduation, and brought him along for what we all knew was going to be his last summer. There was a lot of smiling outdoors and crying in the bathroom. During this party my grandfather pulled me aside and gave me a gift that... I'm not even sure he understood how much it meant to me... My sister took photos, and we all doted a bit more than we should have, but we built a new memory around him that we can carry with us.

Having managed some pretty downer months so far this summer, I took a week at the end of August to take a real vacation to south Utah where I went hiking with four complete strangers I'd met over the internet. Hrmmm... desert... strangers... dangerous climbs? Not the most sane thing I've ever done, but I made some really good friendships that'll last for years to come, and if all goes well, I'll be taking another trip with them this coming June, back to Zion National Park.

September saw ZendCon08 and PHP Appalachia, the latter of which spawned far too many anecdotes about the rowdiness of the PHP community. Where should I start? The semi-naked toxic hot tub? The jagged piece of glass that Chris tried to kill Ben with but got stuck in Cal's foot instead? The fire department we bribed with a cute blonde? Nonono, what happens in Pigeon Forge, stays in Pigeon Forge...

In October, my grandfather fell ill again, holding on just long enough to say good-bye to his children and grandchildren. Sadly his great-grandchildren aren't likely to remember him very well, but thankfully I know that my last words to him were, "I love you", and at least he went quickly. We can all hope for so much when out time eventually comes.

November led to another rowdy conference get together. This time it was php|works in Atlanta, GA, and I dunno about you, but Marco really needs to stop letting me near the open bar. I'm not a frequent drinker, so my tolerance is really very low, and I do... unconventional things when I've had my ninth vodka/cranberry... Doesn't hurt that the bartender was very generous... Oh well, at least I didn't throw up in the taxi on the way to Cal's going-away party. ((Note: I didn't say who did... assuming anyone did... which I didn't say either...))

And oh yeah... the election... biggest sack full of mixed emotions in a long time... Okay, sure, let me get it out, YAY! Obama won. I have HUGE hopes for this guy, and given what I've seen of his transition process, I think he might just stand a chance of living up to his hype. YES. WE. CAN. There, now that that's out of my system, I can go back to being really dissapointed in the One Million californians who voted in favor of Proposition 8. I can go back to slamming my face into the desk whenever I hear the FALSE argument that equal marriage rights will lead to sodomy in the streets and pedophilia in the classrooms. I can go back to being disappointed by my fellow Christians who call homosexuality as significant a threat to humanity as global warming and a threat to world peace. That's not just any Christian saying that by the way, that's the ever-lovin' POPE.

And then here it is: December. My wife and I are talking about getting back together, though I'm not sure we're making progress... I'm doing my best to focus back on my work. I've gotten back into rock climbing, and am eagerly awaiting the snow season to start in earnest. I got up to my dad's for another Christmas with the family, strained by not having gramps around, but I can tell my dad's trying to step up and fill the patriarchal void that's been left. I've spent the past week fighting off a cold and baking cookies. Tomorrow I'll head back into the office and get some work done before having friends over for a new year's eve bash. On thursday, it'll all start over again...

Happy new year.

PHP-2006: A look back

Well, Davey Shafik started us off with his year-end wrapup so I'll follow suit with mine. The thoughts below are mine and mildly influenced by alcohol. They represent a foggy review of how I experienced the year through the imperfect recollection of mailing list archives.

January began with releases of 4.4.2 and 5.1.2. Version 5.1.2 was especially close to my heart since it was the first version to ship an extension of mine not only bundled, but enabled by default. I've had my hands in most of the PHP runtime, but this was the first time I could point at a standard extension and say that it was basicly my work (Note: Mike Wallner did a fair bit of work adding to the number of hash algorithms supported, don't let me discount his efforts). Tim Starling wrote to ask why PHP4 refcounts are 16bit, and what he could do about getting that counter increased in future versions of PHP4. Since such a change would break binary compatability and since the PHP4 branch is already quite dead, the request was ultimately left alone with an admonishment to "not do that".

A few other requests were broached or continued, such as support for Friend Classes, Named Arguments, and Naming Arguments (The last of which would eventually be implemented). It was also this month in which Rasmus suggested adding JSON to the standard distribution, this quietly morphed into votes for including filter; Both were eventually linked in. James Crane had the idea that Array Literals in PHP could use sprucing up, meanwhile Sean Coates planted the seed for what would become the PHP6 Unicode Progress tracker.

February came in fairly quiet, mostly wrapping up the topics from January. Appearantly Steph didn't like the quiet and decided to stir up the hornet's nest with some four letter words cleverly disguised under the heading of True Labeled Breaks. For those who have blocked out 2005, this was easily one of the longest threads of that year and this resumption promised to be just as bad. By March, this thread would finnally be brought to a halt as the functionality was slipped quietly into the engine. I did not see that coming...

Amidst this unexpected addition, others were busily pulling things out, with Andi slashing away at safe_mode in HEAD, and Marcus integrating support for function deprecation into the 5.2 branch.

March came in like a lion with Marcus poking the list about Late Static Binding with less argument about Why, and a healthy focus on How. Johannes Schlueter made a very pragmatic and uncontroversial suggestion to change the internal symbol prefix applied to methods in order to distinguish them from functions. Pierre ran with some PDM recommendations shouting Adieu register_globals and Adieu a la magie. Sebastian Bergmann was frustrated with trying to apply streams filters to include and require, until I pointed him at the php://filter wrapper. Though this met his need, he made a strong case for being able to set an automatic filter to be applied to all streams. I promised to do this after streams in HEAD had been cleaned up, and while I've gotten streams where I want them, I still havn't fullfilled his feature request... Shame on me.

All this time, the GOTO debate was still raging and similar types of language altering features were being put on the table. Finally, Zeev decided he'd had enough calling for people to "Give the language a rest". This managed to have a decent effect which Rasmus soon channeled into his call for performance geeks to narrow the performance gap between 4.4 and 5.1. Towards the end of the month, I suggested adding an open_basedir_for_include directive. While there was some interrest for this, Ilia quickly convinced me that my approach to the problem was flawed and wouldn't give any real benefit.

April showered the internals list with Round 2 of the Late Static Binding discussion, and Thomas Boutell's anouncement that he'd be turning over primary development of the GD library to the PHP project, spearheaded by Pierre. I made some more noise complaining of RETURN_RT_STRING() (and family)'s leakage of memory under certain not-uncommon conditions, while Nuno brought the infamous Coverity Report to attention.

Richard Lynch shared his WTF concerning the oft misunderstood tsrm_ls parameter in PHP's sources. Sadly, I hadn't written my summary of the topic yet, but although noone gave him a detailed description (It's a bit long to go into in an email), several helpful links were supplied. Round about the middle of the month, Rasmus announced PHP's eminent participation in the Google Summer of Code project (wait, don't you work for Yahoo!?). After signing up as a mentor (though I never actually mented -- is that a word?), I gathered up my materials and flew off to php|tek 2006 in Orlando.

May opened to the initial planning rounds for PHP 5.2.0, and the resumption of the ifsetor() request, now dressed up as coalesce(). By the way, why havn't we embraced this feature request yet? About a week into the month, Ilia branched the PHP_5 tree leaving room for the earnest development of 5.2.

William Candillon wrote in to request a PHP version of C's #line macro, but was drowned out by the roar of Derick's plea to "Stop breaking our apps for the sake of OO". Once the din of that had quieted down a little, Jason Garber decided to ask about making it possible to mark properties as read only. In case anyone was curious, none of these proposals gained footing.

June now, and my book is finally released bringing with it an invitation to appear on php|architect's Pro::PHP podcast. Marcus Boerger suggested that array indices could benefit from implicit __toString() calls, but he was eventually shot down. Dimitry's suggestion however, which provided for automatic module global registration via the module entry, did receive a warm welcome and you'll see it if you look inside PHP 5.2.0.

Clearly this was the month of bright ideas, because Nuno Lopes tossed in gcc branch prediction. It got a warm initial reception from the engine folk including Zeev stating "I actually like how it makes the code more readable hinting which branches are rare.". Andi agreed that it was a nice idea, but brought in the sobering reality that it didn't really do much for performance and could potentially bring unexpected results if applied heavily.

July was a busy month for me as I changed jobs for the first time in over six years. I'm loving the new job by the way. Fantastic coworkers and....interresting challenges.... Laupretre François thought it'd be a good idea to extend include_path to support stream wrappers. Those of us who know what trouble include_path already causes for performance and security were quick to nix that particular idea; Short version: No.

Marcus popped in mid-month with an implementation of the #line directive suggested back in May. Still no love from the internals community at large though; Short version: no #line for you. Dmitry committed a large patch to the Zend Engine to change how non-persistent memory is allocated and freed within a request. The good news is that emallocs are now faster, the bad news is that a hack I'd made in PHP5.1 for manipulating the non-persistent memory pool no longer worked...Grrrr.....

On July 27th, Jani said Good-Bye.

August picked up Mike Wallner's July post decrying the state of OO strictness building up in PHP. This maelstrom took up most of the first week with no real conclusion (at least, not a satisfactory one). A different Mike made some more noise later in the month asking why accessing non-existant functions/methods has to be so darned fatal. The good news is that they aren't so much anymore. Yay for E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR.

September brought a landslide of movement in the PHP6 function migration/review process. There was some degree of question as to whether unicode.semantics should be SYSTEM, PERDIR, or USER. Noone really considered the latter as a possibility as it wrecks way too many assumptions, but the SYSTEM/PERDIR debate raged for awhile with the idealists wanting PERDIR support to aid migration, and the realists clinging to the maintainable simplicity of SYSTEM. In the end, SYSTEM won.

October was a relatively slow month, leading up to conference season such as it was. Midmonth sometime I tossed out the idea of allowing open_basedir to be tightened (but not loosened) during runtime and it was green-lighted surprisingly quietly. Ilia got a little frustrated with the mounting delays holding back the release of PHP 5.2.0 which was already way behind schedule. Tragicly, this plea made the delay last even longer. Finally at the end of the month, he rolled final.

November was a big conference month for me. First I crashed the nearby ZendCon, then turned right around and flew off to Germany for the International PHP Conference. Sean poked the namespaces topic with a sharp stick and managed to generate a week's worth of noise resulting in no actual commitments by any capable/interrested parties. No sooner had that comotion died down than did Antony Dovgal bemoan a regression in fgets()'s behavior which I introduced in HEAD. I still think it's a silly behavior for a userspace function, but BCs are BCs, so the regression's been reverted.

December's most exciting event was a debaucle over the backward/forward compatability of serialize given the additional escaping concerns that processing unicode strings imposes. Ilia brought forward a proposal to finally remove the unnecessary COM/Sockets/MHash extensions from the distribution bundle. After some light debate it was decided to keep COM around and only nix Sockets and MHash as of PHP6 (possibly 5.3 if such a version comes about). Wietse Venema brought back the concept of introducing a taint mode for PHP. The topic is still being discussed, but things don't look good for Wietse...

And now here we are, at year's end. PHP6's unicode function migration process has passed the 50% mark and a preview release is sure to come once we handle a couple more extensions. PHP 5.2 is grabbing hold amongst the serious PHP shops, and even web hosters are trickling away from PHP4. There's still a huge, bright future ahead for this language, together we can make it happen.

¡Feliz Año Nuevo!