Posts by ilia
Posts by ilia
A while back a proposal landed on the PHP internals list: deprecate metaphonehttps://discourse.thephp.foundation/t/php-dev-rfc-deprecate-metaphone-function/5391. My first reaction was the reflex of someone who has spent years as a PHP release master....
Here is a bug in a name-parsing library I use at work:
// theiconic/name-parser
$name = $parser->parse'Jane Doe DDS';
$name->getLastname; // "Dds"
$name->getMiddlename; // "Doe"
The dental credential is now her last name. The real surname got ...
DuckDBhttps://duckdb.org/ is the closest thing the analytics world has to SQLite. It runs in-process, needs no server, reads and writes a single file, and chews through columnar aggregate queries that would make a row-store sweat. PHP has shipped PDO...
Most libraries raise their minimum PHP version over time. Drop 8.1, require 8.2, then 8.3, because every release you can assume lets you delete a pile of compatibility shims. This round I went the other way. phpexcel, fastchart, and fastjson now buil...
I generate a lot of UUIDs. Primary keys, cache keys, event IDs, request-trace IDs. Probably too many, if I'm honest about it. On a busy request path the same function gets called dozens of times before the response is even assembled, and across a fle...
I've reached for igbinary on nearly every PHP project I've shipped in the last decade. It's smaller and faster than PHP's native serialize, it's stable, and it has been the obvious default for so long that reaching for it stopped being a decision.
S...
Couple of weeks ago I shipped fastchart 0.2.0 and wrote it up herehttps://ilia.ws/blog/fastchart-0-2-0-native-php-charts-barcodes-and-qr-codes-in-one-extension. One extension, 19 chart types, server-side rendering through ext/gd.
The idea was right,...
// Before
$payload = jsonencode$response;
$data = jsondecode$input, true;
$ok = jsonvalidate$input;
// After
$payload = fastjsonencode$response;
$data = fastjsondecode$input, true;
$ok = fastjsonvalidate$input;
That's the migratio...
new FastChart\StockChart
>setSize1200, 600
>setTitle'AAPL last 90 days'
>setThemeFastChart\Chart::THEMEDARK
>setOhlcv$ohlcvRows
>setMovingAverages20, 50, 200
>setVolumePanetrue
>setCandleStyleFastChart\Chart::STYLEHOLLOW
>renderToFile'/tmp/aapl.png'...
The launch post for phpclickhouse 0.6.0https://ilia.ws/blog/php-clickhouse-a-native-clickhouse-client-for-php-picking-up-where-seasclick-left-off covered the framing: native binary protocol, soft fork of the stalled SeasClick, modern ClickHouse types...
Several of my projects do heavy markdown parsing. Comment rendering, documentation pipelines, content management. The volume keeps growing, and I've been hitting the point where pure-PHP parsers Parsedown, league/commonmark, cebe/markdown, michelf ju...
PHP processes more Excel files than any language except maybe Python. Payroll exports, inventory imports, financial reports, data migrations. If your business runs on spreadsheets and it does, your PHP app touches them constantly.
The standard appro...
Every AI coding agent ships with the same problem: it knows syntax but not discipline. It can write a React component or debug a segfault, but it won't ask "did I verify this actually works?" before declaring victory. It won't split a 400-line diff i...
In 2005 I wrote a PHP binding for libstatgrab and pushed it to PECL. The extension took CPU, memory, disk I/O, network, process, and user statistics from a cross-platform C library and exposed them to PHP as plain functions. I moved on to other thing...
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