Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language.

This is Episode 72. PHP eight is going to be released today, November 26. In this episode, we look back across the season to find out which new features are in PHP eight dot zero. If I have spoken with the instigator of each of these features, I'm letting them explain what this new feature is. in the first episode of this current year, I spoke with Nikita Popov about weak maps, a feature that builds on top of the weak references that were introduced in PHP seven four. I asked: What's wrong with the weak references and why do we now need to weak maps.

There's nothing wrong with references. This is a reminder, what weak references are about, they allow you to reference, an object, without preventing it from being garbage collected. So if the object is unset, then you're just left with a dangling reference, and if you try to access it you will get acknowledged sort of the object. Now the probably most common use case for any kind of weak data structure is a map or an associative array, where you have objects and want to associate some kind of data with some typical use cases are caches or other memoize data structures. And the reason why it's important for this to be weak, is that you do not. Well, if you want to cache some data with the object and then nobody else is using that object, you don't really want to keep around that cache data, because no one is ever going to use it again, and it's just going to take up memory usage. And this is what the weak map does. So you use objects as keys, use some kind of data as the value. And if the object is no longer used outside this map, then is also removed from the map as well.

A main use case for weak maps will likely be ORMs and related tools. In the next, episode 38, I discussed this trainable interface with Nicolas Grekas from Symfony fame. I asked: Nicolas, could you explain what stringable is.

Hello, and stringable is an interface that people could use to declare that they implement some the magic to string method.

That was a short and sweet answer, but a reason for wanting to introduce this new interface was much more complicated, and are also potential issues with breaking backwards compatibility. Nikolas replied to my questioning about that with:

That's another goal of the RFC; the way I've designed it is that I think the actual current code should be able to express the type right now using annotations, of course. So, what I mean is that the interface, the proposal, the stringable is very easily polyfilled, so we just create this interface in the global namespace that declare the method and done, so we can do that now, we can improve the typing's now. And then in the future, we'll be able to turn that into an actual union type.

I had a chat with Nikita Popov about union types as part of the last season in Episode 33 before PHP seven four was