The Php Times

Gina P. Banyard opened discussion on a bundled RFC proposing multiple deprecations for PHP 8.6, following the annual tradition of consolidating deprecation proposals compiled over the preceding year. Contributors will vote on each deprecation individually. The RFC must reach a frozen state by July 13th under updated RFC policy rules. Community members are still invited to propose additional deprecations before the deadline.

A significant critique emerged from Juliette Reinders Folmer, who noted that nearly all proposals lacked impact analysis—data on how many real-world codebases would be affected. She emphasized this omission as irresponsible for informed voting and offered to help establish systematic assessments using PHP_CodeSniffer and PHPCompatibility tools, which she estimated could cover approximately 70% of the proposals.

Osama Aldemeery demonstrated the kind of analysis Folmer advocated by sharing detailed impact metrics for the return-in-finally deprecation. He compiled approximately 5,000 of the most-installed Composer packages with a patched PHP build, finding the new deprecation triggered in only 12 locations across 9 packages (roughly 0.18% of surveyed code). His breakdown revealed three instances where the deprecation would catch latent bugs involving exception handling, while the remaining nine either deliberately relied on the behaviour or posed no functional issue. He published the full methodology and per-site breakdown on GitHub for reproducibility.