On 23/03/2022 23:39, Juliette Reinders Folmer wrote:
While I agree the functions are often used incorrectly, what worries me about this RFC is that the only viable alternatives for these functions are in two optional extensions, which in practice will mean lots of projects will need to start polyfilling the old functions and/or start including a polyfill for one of the extensions, as they can not rely on those optional extensions being turned on.
While I certainly understand this concern, the more I look into it, the less worried I am, because so many projects already require the mbstring extension. The list includes projects like PHPUnit, Laravel, Drupal, and phpBB. A lot of others will probably detect it at run-time, and disable certain functionality - WooCommerce lists it as required only for non-English sites, for instance.
There probably is a case for making mbstring always-on rather than optional, but that perhaps requires a bigger discussion around what a "minimum" PHP should include. Why is XML support not always enabled, for instance?
If these functions were proposed today, under better names but the same feature set, I don't think mbstring being optional would be accepted as reasoning for adding them to core. So the only reason to keep them is if they're widely (and successfully) used, which I've not found evidence for.
Regards, -- Rowan Tommins [IMSoP] -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: https://www.php.net/unsub.php
