I just extended Quercus to support the new core language features of PHP 5.4. The changes are currently in our subversion repository and should be in our next release: 4.0.34. Traits, new in 5.4, was a bit of a pain to implement because of all the weird edge cases (i.e. __CLASS__, insteadof, as). Here’s a list of what’s new:

• traits

  <?php
  
  trait T0 {
    function foo()
    {
      echo "inside T0->foo()\n";
    }
  }
  
  class A {
    use T0;
  }
  
  $a = new A();
  $a->foo();
  
  ?>
  

• short array syntax

  <?php
  
  $a = ["a" => 123, "b" => 456];
  
  ?>
  

• function array dereferencing

  <?php
  
  $a[0]();
  
  ?>
  

• $this use in closures

  <?php
  
  class A {
    var $foo = 123;
  
    function test() {
      $fun = function() {
        var_dump($this->foo);
      };
  
      $fun();
    }
  }
  
  $a = new A();
  $a->test();
  
  ?>
  

• <?= short open tag is now always on

  <?php
  
    $hello = "hello world";
  
  ?>
  <b><?= $hello ?></b>
  

• class member access on instantiation

  <?php
  
  class A
  {
    function foo()
    {
      echo "inside A->foo()\n";
    }
  }
  
  (new A())->foo();
  
  ?>
  

• Class::{expr}() syntax

  <?php
  
  class A
  {
    static function foo()
    {
      echo "inside A::foo()\n";
    }
  }
  
  $name = "foo";
  A::{$name}();
  
  ?>
  

• binary number format: 0b001001101

  <?php
  
  // int(7)
  var_dump(0b111);
  
  ?>
  

• $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT'] is populated

  <?php
  
  // returns a float (i.e. float(1356829982.6495))
  var_dump($_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT']);
  
  ?>
  

And for those that are still with me, I’m aiming to have PHP 5.5 support in our 4.0.35 release :).

– Nam

Nam Nguyen is a Software Engineer at Caucho Technology in San Diego/San Francisco. He is currently the lead for the Quercus project.

Tags: php 5.4, quercus, traits

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 29th, 2012 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Announcements, Engineering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.