Contributing to PHP's Core

Ever wanted to contribute to PHP's Core? This is your time! From tests to a new function, PHP is open for new contributors. Fixing bugs, document things, cleanups, refactorings, or even new small functions. In this talk, we're gonna see how the is_countable function was made, and what we can learn from that.

Transcript

1. Contributing to PHP's Core by Gabriel Caruso ScotlandPHP 2019
2. https://youtu.be/8BTxmPppPeQ
3. Who am I? • Backend Developer at Usabilla by Survey Monkey • Communities member • OSS contributor • Talks/Stickers/ELEPHANTS lover
4. Why did I decide to contribute to PHP's Source Code?
5. We at Doctrine have a repository called coding-standard where we define our style rules - Style - Code smell - Defense programming - Best practices
6. compact() function https://php.net/compact
8. "Any strings that are not set will simply be skipped."
10. What if the compact() function starts to report undefined variables?
11. Ok, questions: - How do I even find the code that "runs" PHP? - Can I contribute to it? - What do I need to know (technologies) to understand it? - How does it work? - Will they accept this change? - Ok, enough
12. Where is the PHP’s Core?
13. https://git.php.net
14. https://github.com/php/php-src
15. Anyone can contribute to it?
16. Yes PHP's Source Code is open source "Open source software is a software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance."
17. How do I understand it?
18. Programming Language - Lexer - Parser - Compilation - Interpretation
19. PHP is a C codebase
20. Would they accept my proposal?
21. RFC Request For Comments, a.k.a, discuss the feature until everyone has no more questions about the implementation - Formal document - Voting
22. Right, now I knew what I need to do: - Open a pull request to php/php-src on GitHub - Write and open for voting a RFC
23. How could I learn how to code for the Core?
24. The Community
25. Sammy Kaye The PHP Roundtable guy
26. Writing tests for PHP source In this course, he teaches how you can compile the PHP Source and also how to write tests to PHP
27. Nikita Popov THE man
28. How to add new (syntactic) features to PHP In that article, Nikita teaches how the Parser, Lexer and Zend Virtual Machine (VM) work
29. PHP Internals Book That book explains a lot of parts of the Internals. Introduce the picture of a book here
30. Why should you contribute to PHP's Source Code?
31. Is Coding the only way?
32. NO! Documentation, extensions, discussion, bug report...
33. Andreas Heigl He is leading a team to migrate the PHP Documentation from SVN to Git and mirror that on GitHub
34. Derick Rethans Author of Xdebug, he has the knowledge to help anyone create an extension for PHP
35. Ondrej Mirtes Author of PHPStan, his project is changing the way we think about PHP
36. You can change PHP! And you can do it in some many ways...
37. @carusogabriel Questionings? Thank you ♡