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PHP 4.3.6 Released

Posted by michael on from the hyped-up-on-php dept.

ehmdjii writes "The PHP Development Team is proud to announce the release of PHP 4.3.6. This is is a bug fix release whose primary goal is to address two bugs which may result in crashes in PHP builds with thread-safety enabled. All users of PHP in a threaded environment (Windows) are strongly encouraged to upgrade to this release. All in all this release fixes approximately 25 bugs that have been discovered since the 4.3.5 release. For a full list of changes in PHP 4.3.6, see the ChangeLog."

9 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Compile 64bit? by Rtsbasic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does this mean PHP will compile as 64bit code now?
    "Fixed bug #27717 (Test Failures when compiled on 64-bit mode)"

  2. Threaded environment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's not just Windows that can be threaded environments, FreeBSD and Linux also have the option of using the per-child MPM.

    1. Re:Threaded environment by Electrum · · Score: 2, Interesting

      FreeBSD and Linux also have the option of using the per-child MPM

      According to the Apache docs, perchild MPM does not work. Using FastCGI PHP will likely have much better results. PHP has always had problems with thread safety.

    2. Re:Threaded environment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You mean UNIX has always had problems with thread safety. It's not really PHP that is the issue here, it is the large number of libraries that can be compiled into PHP. For example, the very common gdbm library is not threadsafe. And for the longest time the PostgreSQL client library was "mostly" threadsafe except if you happened to use crypt() in a query. Or how about the c-client library? Blaming PHP for not solving problems in 3rd-party libraries is not really fair. A generic PHP script that doesn't touch any troublesome third-party libraries will run just fine in a threaded environment.

    3. Re:Threaded environment by Electrum · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Blaming PHP for not solving problems in 3rd-party libraries is not really fair.

      You are correct that PHP's thread safety issues (most likely) lie with third party libraries. However, PHP could fix most of the problems by using mutexes around the unsafe library calls.

  3. Re:NO MORE PHP! by yelvington · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If anyone is forcing you to entangle content, presentation and business logic, dial 911.

    Try some self-discipline. It's not the language's fault.

  4. thread bugs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Oh please, PHP can't handle threads properly. Yet another reason to switch to Per-- oh wait, threads? Nevermind.

  5. Re:NO MORE PHP! by tiptone · · Score: 5, Informative


    don't bother with 911 just download Smarty.

    Try it, it's what makes PHP really nice. PHP without Smarty is almost sure to become an unmaintainable mess, especially if more than one person is working on a project. PHP + Smarty is the perfect seperation of content, presentation, and business logic.

    --
    Please don't read my sig.
  6. Re:PHP 5 by JoScherl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think you don't really need public/private/protected in a scripting language. More interesting for me are other improvements like that assignments like

    $a = new foo();
    $b =$a;

    are made by reference. With PHP4 even the first line would create a copy of the object. Also interesting arenew extensions like MySLi, the new soap extension or the rewrite of the XML-Extensin based on libxml2 (including the realy nice SimpleXML-Extension) ....

    A collection of PHP5 information can be found p.e. on this German site (most links lead to English pages, and I'm one of the ones running this site - so it's the best (German) PHP site *g*)