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PHP 5.6.0 Released

Posted by timothy on from the still-hard-to-pronounce dept.

An anonymous reader writes The PHP team has announced the release of PHP 5.6.0. New features include constant scalar expressions, exponentiation using the ** operator, function and constant importing with the use keyword, support for file uploads larger than 2 GB, and phpdbg as an interactive integrated debugger SAPI. The team also notes important changes affecting compatibility. For example: "Array keys won't be overwritten when defining an array as a property of a class via an array literal," json_decode() is now more strict at parsing JSON syntax, and GMP resources are now objects. Here is the migration guide, the full change log, and the downloads page.

17 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Now almost as useful as python was 5 years ago! by wisnoskij · · Score: 2

    It does not have to be useful when it has been given a monopoly over the entire industry.

    --
    Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
  2. It's powerful, but.. by timrod · · Score: 5, Funny

    Have they come up with another way to calculate the number of days between any given day and Easter yet? I've been waiting for years for a third function to be added to easter_days and easter_date.. a sort of holy trinity, if you will.

    1. Re:It's powerful, but.. by tendrousbeastie · · Score: 2

      I assume it is an ironic joke.

      Historically calculating the date of Easter was a hugely difficult and complicated task for medieval scholastic monks - one that involved a huge amount of time and controversy.

    2. Re:It's powerful, but.. by pspahn · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Can you really not figure it out?

      First off, would it be quite easy for you to tell me off the top of your head what the date of Easter will be in 2021? How about just next year? The date it falls on it fairly complicated and not exactly simple to write an algorithm for.

      Ok, but who will use it? I guess it comes as a surprise that it is a fairly important holiday for religious reasons and that a number of other holidays' dates are intertwined with Easter.

      If you really see no practical application for that, well I guess you're just not trying hard enough.

      --
      Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
    3. Re:It's powerful, but.. by slashdice · · Score: 2

      the point is, they're built-in functions. Not a library or package, but part of the core language. What other language has a function (let alone two functions) to tell you when easter is?

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      Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
  3. Re:Yes it's easy, with this code: by Qzukk · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's baby_jesus_real_butthole(first_half_of_needle, haystack, last_half_of_needle), duh. But don't blame php for that, that's the name of the function straight from libjesus.

    --
    If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
  4. It's powerful, but.. by slashdice · · Score: 2

    holy shit, I thought you were joking.

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    Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
  5. Re:You can get into trouble for using PHP by Jason+Levine · · Score: 2

    For a split second, I was going to voice my outrage over such a thing happening before my brain kicked in and I remembered that BBSpot is a humor website.

    In my defense, though, when a teen can be arrested for writing a story in which he uses a gun to kill his neighbor's pet dinosaur, the humor/satire stories can be hard to separate from the true stories.

    --
    My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
  6. Re:Now almost as useful as python was 5 years ago! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    For what it's worth getArray()[3] was working two years ago (it's been working since PHP 5.4)

  7. Re:Now almost as useful as python was 5 years ago! by Jmstuckman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    PHP is a horrible programming language, but I know why people like PHP applications -- the ability to install an application on a LAMP stack by just untarring a single archive into the deployment directory is priceless.

    Last time I tried to install a Python web application, I had to give the installer root privileges to install a bunch of junk in some system-wide module directory. No thanks.

    Last time I tried to install a Ruby web application, I ran into a bunch of snafus related to newer versions of Ruby not being backwards compatible with older code, and discovered that the "right" way to do it was to install a whole new package management system that wasn't in sync with my OS's own package manager. No thanks to that, either.

  8. It's not the knife... by Aethedor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    it's the cook that prepares the food. It's not the camera, it's the photographer that shoots the picture. It's not the racing car, it's the driver that wins the race. It's not the programming language, it's the programmer that creates the application.

    All you whiners can bash PHP like you want. But a PHP website will still beat your Perl website if the PHP programmer is better than you. So, unless your coding skills are 100% perfect, you better start looking at your own flaws instead of wasting time at whining about a programming language that simply isn't your pick of choice. Please, it's time to grow up.

    --
    It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
    1. Re:It's not the knife... by Ignacio · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "... if the PHP programmer is better than you."

      For every good-to-excellent PHP programmer there is a small army of mediocre-to-bad PHP programmers. You get chefs that deep-fry rubber boots, photographers that can't tell the lens from the viewfinder, and drivers that can't put a car in gear without breaking something.

      But it also doesn't help when the programming language tells them that someone somewhere likes to eat overcooked footwear, or hands them a camera which is a featureless cube with two identical holes on either side, or takes away the gear shift and replaces it with a button labelled "Crash".

    2. Re:It's not the knife... by Ignacio · · Score: 2

      "Other" people's time? As far as I can tell, the only other person's time I'm wasting is yours. Want to go ballooning this weekend? We don't even need to bring fuel.

    3. Re:It's not the knife... by websitebroke · · Score: 2

      You know, I read that article, and I walked away from it thinking the guy just really doesn't understand what exactly a scripting language is for, and how they work. For example, he was so incensed at the === operator, contending that == in PHP is useless. But it's quite useful. If you're testing for "truthy" values such as true, 1, or a character string, you use ==. If you need an actual boolean, use ===.

  9. 24 CVE fixes in one language system release by mr_mischief · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Here are the lines matching for grep -P 'CVE-\d{4}-\d+':

    Fixed bug #67390 (insecure temporary file use in the configure script). (CVE-2014-3981)
    Fixed bug #66060 (Heap buffer over-read in DateInterval). (CVE-2013-6712)
    Fixed bug #67716 (Segfault in cdf.c). (CVE-2014-3587)
    Fixed bug #67705 (extensive backtracking in rule regular expression). (CVE-2014-3538)
    Fixed bug #67327 (fileinfo: CDF infinite loop in nelements DoS). (CVE-2014-0238)
    Fixed bug #67328 (fileinfo: fileinfo: numerous file_printf calls resulting in performance degradation). (CVE-2014-0237)
    Fixed bug #67326 (fileinfo: cdf_read_short_sector insufficient boundary check). (CVE-2014-0207)
    Fixed bug #67410 (fileinfo: mconvert incorrect handling of truncated pascal string size). (CVE-2014-3478)
    Fixed bug #67411 (fileinfo: cdf_check_stream_offset insufficient boundary check). (CVE-2014-3479)
    Fixed bug #67412 (fileinfo: cdf_count_chain insufficient boundary check). (CVE-2014-3480)
    Fixed bug #67413 (fileinfo: cdf_read_property_info insufficient boundary check). (CVE-2014-3487)
    Fixed bug #66731 (file: infinite recursion). (CVE-2014-1943)
    Fixed bug #66820 (out-of-bounds memory access in fileinfo). (CVE-2014-2270)
    Fixed bug #66946 (fileinfo: extensive backtracking in awk rule regular expression). (CVE-2013-7345)
    Fixed bug #67060 (sapi/fpm: possible privilege escalation due to insecure default configuration). (CVE-2014-0185)
    Fixed bug #67730 (Null byte injection possible with imagexxx functions). (CVE-2014-5120)
    Fixed bug #66901 (php-gd 'c_color' NULL pointer dereference). (CVE-2014-2497)
    Fixed bug #66356 (Heap Overflow Vulnerability in imagecrop()). (CVE-2013-7226)
    Fixed bug #66815 (imagecrop(): insufficient fix for NULL defer). (CVE-2013-7327)
    Fixed bug #67717 (segfault in dns_get_record). (CVE-2014-3597)
    Fixed bug #67432 (Fix potential segfault in dns_get_record()). (CVE-2014-4049)
    Fixed bug #67539 (ArrayIterator use-after-free due to object change during sorting). (CVE-2014-4698)
    Fixed bug #67538 (SPL Iterators use-after-free). (CVE-2014-4670)
    Fixed bug #67492 (unserialize() SPL ArrayObject / SPLObjectStorage Type Confusion). (CVE-2014-3515)

    That's not the applications written in PHP, mind you. That's the language system.

  10. Re:Now almost as useful as python was 5 years ago! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That's because PHP doesn't require anything extra except tuning max_execution_time and the memory limits to make it work for everyone. I'd demand extra money if I had to babysit your rails process and kill it when it consumes a gig of ram on a shared host.

  11. PHP making great progress by justin+samuel · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm certainly biased because my company (ServerPilot) sells a service for PHP developers using DigitalOcean and other servers, but it does seem like PHP is making great progress in the past few years both in the language and in terms of a strong developer community. We're very glad to see PHP 5.3 EOL'd recently. To encourage adoption of 5.6, we've already packaged and added support for 5.6.