Hi I'm Derick. Welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to explain the latest developments in the PHP language. This is Episode 75. In this episode, I'm talking with Nikita Popov about a few RFCs that he has been working on over the past few months. Nikita, would you please introduce yourself?

Hi, I'm Nikita, I work at JetBrains on PHP core development and as such I get to occasionally, write PHP proposals RFCs and then talk with Derick about them.

The main idea behind you working on RFCs is that PHP gets new features not, you end up talking to me.

I mean that's a side benefit,

In any case we have a few to go this time. The first RFC is titled phasing out Serializable, it's a fairly small RFC. What is it about?

That finishes up a bit of work from PHP 7.4, where we introduced a new serialization mechanism, actually the third one, we have. So we have a bit too many of them, and this removes the most problematic one.

Which three Serializable methods or ways of doing things currently exist?

The first one, which doesn't really count is just what you get if you don't do anything, so just all the Object Properties get serialized, and also unserialized, and then we have a number of hooks, you can use to modify that. The first pair is sleep and wake up. Sleep specifies which properties you want to serialize so you can filter out some of them, and wake up allows you to run some code, after unserialization, so you can do some kind of fix up afterwards.

From what I remember, if you use unserialize, where does the wake up the constructor doesn't get called?

During unserialization the constructor, never gets called.

So wake up a sort of the static factory methods to re rehydrate the objects.

Exactly.

So that's number one,

Then number two is the Serializable interface, which gives you more control. Namely, you have to actually like return the serialized representation of your object. How it looks like is completely unspecified, you could return whatever you want, though, in practice, what people actually do is to recursively call serialize. And then on the other side when unserializing you usually do the same so you call unserialize on the stream you receive, and then populate your properties based on that. The problem with this mechanism is exactly this recursive serialization call, because it has to share state, with the main serialization. And the