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🧵 This Week in PHP Internals — Jul 1, 2026 Generics AND __exists both voted down. A deprecations RFC became a fight about evidence. A new Primary Constructors RFC. And a heartfelt plea for async. Full video 👇 youtu.be/dX_Hd_92x7M #PHP #PHPInternals #PHP86

Top story: Deprecations for 8.6 (Gina P. Banyard). The omnibus keeps growing right before feature freeze — list(), maybe array(), open_basedir, dechunk — and it sparked a real fight: should every deprecation ship an impact analysis?

It got personal (a gaslighting accusation, firmly rejected) — but the substance had backing. Rowan Tommins came to the defense: "I hate this argument." Larry Garfield agreed: put the impact on the table, or read the angry blog posts come December.

Time\Duration (Tim Düsterhus & Derick Rethans) is slimming down for 8.6: add / subtract / multiply now, division later. The word "period" is dropped from the method names, and negative durations are now allowed.

New: Primary Constructors (Rob Landers) — the whole constructor hoisted onto the class line. The fight: allow a body? Rob says no — "use a constructor." ~30–40% of constructors are empty; 71% Laravel / 61% Symfony could use it.

Runtime modules → "containers" (Alex Pătrănescu): private symbol tables so two versions of one package can coexist. Rowan keeps circling the hard part — what happens when an object crosses the container wall?

The rawest thread: a user's "Disheartening Rant" (Michael Morris) after TrueAsync's author gave it a 90% chance of failing. Larry: don't confuse "not this async, this way" with "no async, ever." He wants a real working group.

Votes: Generics DECLINED 7–19–10; __exists 2–13. The small ones sailed: return-from-ctor 39–0 (unanimous), php://filter cap 30–0–2, Locale keywords 18–0–2. Still open: 3rd-party ext docs 25–1–1 (closes Jul 3).