Hello world, it's Wednesday, July 8, 2026, and here's what happened This Week in PHP Internals.
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This week's top story is still Gina P. Banyard's Deprecations for PHP 8.6 — the annual bundle where every removal gets its own ballot — and this week it caught fire twice. First fire: the long-array question. With Seifeddine Gmati's list() deprecation already on the table, Tim Düsterhus floated a draft that turns array() into a real cast function — and Michael Morris erupted at where that road leads. He asked, "Are you crazy?" — deprecating array() would, by his math, touch 3 quarters of WordPress core and nearly every plugin. Seif's counter was all receipts: the rewrite is one ast-grep command, array(...) and [...] compile to byte-identical opcodes — and, for the record, "The proposal is to deprecate list(), not array()." Then Juliette Reinders Folmer — who maintains the WordPress Coding Standards — corrected everyone: WordPress still supports PHP 7.4, and short arrays were blocked there for years by a handful of core committers, not the community.
