explore | Grilled Cheese

This Week in PHP Internals began when Len Woodward gave Claude Cowork his inbox. It's great at summarizing, but he won't let it write anything unmonitored. #PHP #AI

Brent Roose wondered why nobody was covering PHP internals. Len Woodward had the gear, and "the only thing stopping me... is hitting the record button." #PHP #PHPInternals

FFmpeg is miserable to work with from PHP, so Len Woodward's team built a PHP extension with FFmpeg bindings and they're teaching it at least once a week. #PHP #FFmpeg

Reddit says, "It's all AI." Len Woodward used AI to help summarize, then put in 3 hours of script revisions before he ever hit record. #PHP #AI

Non-native speakers on PHP internals translate replies with an LLM, and the LLM starts arguing for them. Len Woodward's fix: use Google Translate and attach your original message. #PHP #OpenSource #AI

PHP features get debated on internals "until everyone is nauseated." Len Woodward on why the language can look slow from the outside. #PHP #PHPInternals

I've written SO many string transformations full of temp variables and fn() wrappers. PHP 8.6's partial function application plus the pipe operator gets rid of both.

#PHP #PHP86 #CleanCode

https://www.phparch.com/2026/09/stop-writing-php-like-this-8-6-fixes-it/

PHP 8.6 lands on November 19th, 2026, but you don't have to wait. I recorded my walkthrough on beta 3 with the official Docker image (php:8.6.0beta3-cli), so test your app now.

#PHP #PHP86 #Docker

https://www.phparch.com/2026/09/stop-writing-php-like-this-8-6-fixes-it/

My PHP 8.6 video covers the features I think will make my personal life better. Which one should I have covered instead?

#PHP #PHP86 #phpc

https://www.phparch.com/2026/09/stop-writing-php-like-this-8-6-fixes-it/

Rendez-vous ce jeudi au Forum PHP organisé par l'@afup.org !

Je vous présenterai @docker.com Sandboxes : comment tirer le meilleur parti de vos agents de code tout en les utilisant dans un environnement isolé et sécurisé.
Laissez-les travailler en autonomie, sereinement. 😇

#Docker #Sandbox #PHP

Partial function application is a fancy computer science term for setting up a function with some of its parameters now and passing the rest later. PHP 8.6 makes it native syntax.

#PHP #PHP86 #FunctionalProgramming

https://www.phparch.com/2026/09/stop-writing-php-like-this-8-6-fixes-it/

Two new symbols to learn in PHP 8.6: ? is the argument placeholder, and ... means zero or more parameters. Define the function up front and fill in the rest later.

#PHP #PHP86 #FunctionalProgramming

https://www.phparch.com/2026/09/stop-writing-php-like-this-8-6-fixes-it/

Pair the PHP 8.5 pipe operator with PHP 8.6 partial function application and you get some VERY concise code (and I expect Rector to help convert the old stuff).

#PHP #PHP86 #CleanCode

https://www.phparch.com/2026/09/stop-writing-php-like-this-8-6-fixes-it/

I've handwritten min/max range checks for the current page number more times than I can count. PHP 8.6 adds clamp(), and I might polyfill it in older projects.

#PHP #PHP86 #CleanCode

https://www.phparch.com/2026/09/stop-writing-php-like-this-8-6-fixes-it/

PHP 8.6's clamp() has a built-in range check, so you can't mix up the min and max values. I've done that more than once, so I'm VERY happy about this one.

#PHP #PHP86 #CodeQuality

https://www.phparch.com/2026/09/stop-writing-php-like-this-8-6-fixes-it/

Laravel API Generator 4.0 is out. Its MCP server lets Claude Code, Copilot or Cursor plan a Laravel API, show every file, then generate it without touching your hand edits. The VS Code extension got a redesign too.

github.com/Nameless0l/laravel-api-generator

#Laravel #PHP

The PHP ecosystem keeps taking PHP and stuffing it inside something else. bun-php is the latest one. What's your favorite embedded PHP project?

https://www.phparch.com/podcast/community-corner-podcast-bun-php-with-stanislav-khromov/

#PHP #Bun #WebAssembly

array_multisort() takes SORT_ASC/SORT_DESC as ints, so 42 gets right through. PHP 8.6 adds a SortDirection enum in the global namespace, and the RFC hints at wider adoption.

#PHP #PHP86 #TypeSafety

https://www.phparch.com/2026/09/stop-writing-php-like-this-8-6-fixes-it/

@StanislavKhromov wanted PHPStan from a TypeScript project without shipping a separate PHP runtime next to it. So he embedded all of PHP in Bun.

https://www.phparch.com/podcast/community-corner-podcast-bun-php-with-stanislav-khromov/

#PHP #PHPStan #Bun

In PHP 8.4, fulfilling an interface property meant redefining the whole property hook. PHP 8.6 lets a readonly property do it and keeps the class much tighter. Big win for value objects.

#PHP #PHP86 #OOP

https://www.phparch.com/2026/09/stop-writing-php-like-this-8-6-fixes-it/