Book Image

PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks and Best Practices

By : Doug Bierer
Book Image

PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks and Best Practices

By: Doug Bierer

Overview of this book

Thanks to its ease of use, PHP is a highly popular programming language used on over 78% of all web servers connected to the Internet. PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices will help you to get up-to-speed with PHP 8 quickly. The book is intended for any PHP developer who wants to become familiar with the cool new features available in PHP 8, and covers areas where developers might experience backward compatibility issues with their existing code after a PHP 8 update. The book thoroughly explores best practices, and highlights ways in which PHP 8 enforces these practices in a much more rigorous fashion than its earlier versions. You'll start by exploring new PHP 8 features in the area of object-oriented programming (OOP), followed by enhancements at the procedural level. You'll then learn about potential backward compatible breaks and discover best practices for improving performance. The last chapter of the book gives you insights into PHP async, a revolutionary new way of programming, by providing detailed coverage and examples of asynchronous programming using the Swoole extension and Fibers. By the end of this PHP book, you'll not only have mastered the new features, but you'll also know exactly what to watch out for when migrating older PHP applications to PHP 8.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: PHP 8 Tips
6
Section 2: PHP 8 Tricks
11
Section 3: PHP 8 Best Practices

Understanding FFI

The main purpose of a FFI is to allow any given programming language the ability to incorporate code and function calls from external libraries written in other languages. An early example of this was the ability of 1980s microcomputers to incorporate assembler language into otherwise sluggish Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) programming language scripts using the PEEK and POKE commands. Unlike many other languages, PHP did not have this capability prior to PHP 7.4, although it had been under discussion since 2004.

In order to gain a full understanding of FFI in PHP 8, it's necessary to digress and have a look at why it took so long for FFI to be fully adopted into the PHP language. It's also necessary to take a quick look at PHP extensions in general, and the ability to work with C-language code. We first examine the relationship between PHP and the C language.

Relationship between PHP and the C language

The C language...