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La conférence

What's New in PHP 8.5 During this presentation, we are going to look at the new features that are going to be introduced in PHP 8.5. Join me to have a look at pipes, the new URL parsing API, improvements of i18n features, and upgrades to the type system. At the end you will have a good understanding about all the new and exciting features that are part of the PHP 8.5 release.

Adrien GALLOU - ABCDEF 09/10/2025 10:45-11:25

Some of the new features in PHP 8.5 seem designed with frameworks like Symfony or Laravel in mind. Do you see PHP evolving more and more in tandem with these frameworks?

The frameworks are some of the larger users of PHP, and therefore I guess it makes sense that PHP implements new features that benefit these frameworks.

It also is probably because, especially with Symfony, some of their representatives are on the board of the Foundation, and therefore have a slightly better way of convincing the PHP developers to also add these features.

But I don’t think all of it is from just the frameworks, there’s lots of things, especially to the type system that were driven from the PHP development project itself, and obviously they will still benefit the frameworks for having better type interference and stuff like that, but that wasn’t the original goal.

You are an active contributor of anothor open source project, OpenStreeMap. Are you willing to tell us about why and how you contribute to this project?

I’ve been involved with OpenStreetMap for quite some time, since when I moved to London actually, because it combines three interesting things: Walking, maps and pubs. And it was a great way for me to find new friends here in London when I just moved here.

Back then, now 15 years ago, most of London wasn’t actually mapped yet, so we would go out every six weeks or so, to add new streets and businesses to the map. Whereas now basically everything is there not only in the UK, but also in France and Germany. That doesn’t mean that sometimes on the countryside there are still things missing and businesses change all the time and it gives me a good a good incentive to go out and for a walk. I also still meet up with these people about every two months or so, and have a tasty pint in the pub to talk about
maps. So it is a good hobby for me!

Some of our volunteers know that you’ve been learning French for a few months. Which similarities do you find between learning a programming language and a spoken language?

I’m not sure whether I agree with the premise of this question because I think computer languages are very much different from natural languages.

In computer languages you have to be really precise and everything is according to rules that are to be followed exactly, which obviously is not the case with languages.

And especially because some languages, the Roman languages like French, they have article and grammatical gender, which is of course something a computer language doesn’t really have. But learning both of them requires quite a lot of effort and attention and you also learn these things best by being in an environment where you have to use it.

Like C and PHP, and other languages that i write, you only really get good at when actually using them. And that’s the same thing with natural languages. To learn French best you should probably live in France — it’s a similar way when I learned Norwegian, if I hadn’t lived in Norway, I wouldn’t have been able to learn that language.

And although English isn’t my first language, it wasn’t bad when I moved here all these years ago. But only by living here do you really get the nuances of a language. So you do need to do the practice to make these things work.

I would say beyond that, there’s not actual similarities too much.

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Une conférence présentée par

Derick RETHANS

Derick Rethans is a PHP internals expert and author of Xdebug. He works as an independent contractor with the PHP Foundation to improve PHP, by contributing to the project in numerous forms, such as the Date/Time Extension, Xdebug, and managing its server set-up. He is a frequent lecturer at conferences, the author of php|architect's Guide to Date and Time Programming, and the co-author of PHP 5 Power Programming. In his spare time, he likes to travel, hike, and photography.

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