happened This Week in PHP Internals.
11 stories this week, so let's get into it. But first, Your team adopted AI. Everyone says it made them faster. Ballast measures whether that's true — how much faster you're actually going, and whether what you ship is still holding up. 6.75 times the commits. Durability down 19 points. Now you know. It runs on your machine. It reads your git history, not your source — your code never goes anywhere, and nothing here is scored by a model. It's arithmetic you could check by hand. Setting it up isn't your job either. Paste one prompt into your coding agent and it does the whole thing. Find out for free today. ballast.now.
One correction before the top story. Last week we described the list() deprecation vote as deadlocked at 21 to 21. Derick Rethans pointed out that's the wrong word — a deadlock is when something is stuck and can't proceed. The vote wasn't stuck. It was simply tied, and voting carried on to the finish. He's right, we'll say it properly this week — and thanks, Derick, for keeping us precise.
This week's top story: the verdict is in on the 35-ballot mass deprecation vote for PHP 8.6. Voting closed Monday at 13:00 UTC, and Gina P. Banyard posted the full results — 31 proposals accepted, 4 rejected. Start with the 4 that fell. Deprecating list() finished on a flat tie — 23 to 23, with 1 abstention — exactly 50 percent, nowhere near two-thirds. Reserving in, out, and inout failed at 8 to 21. The gettext _() alias survived at 10 to 22. And the dechunk filter — the item disputed all through the voting window — finished at 18 to 15 with 12 abstentions, 54.5 percent, and stays in the language.
