Xdebug Update: June 2023 – Derick Rethans

Xdebug Update: June 2023

In this monthly update I explain what happened with Xdebug development in this past two months. These are normally published on the first Tuesday on or after the 5th of each month.

Patreon and GitHub supporters will get it earlier, around the first of each month.

You can become a patron or support me through GitHub Sponsors. I am currently 38% towards my $2,500 per month goal, which is set to allow continued maintenance of Xdebug.

If you are leading a team or company, then it is also possible to support Xdebug through a subscription.

In the last month, I spend around 10 hours on Xdebug, with 24 hours funded. This is much less than I wanted, but instead I have been busy implementing features for PHP, and been on holiday. I expect to spend a significantly more amount of time on Xdebug in July.

Towards Xdebug 3.3

Now PHP 8.3 has its first alpha releases made, it is time to have a look at what needs to be added to Xdebug to support these new features. At the moment, it looks like there are no actual breaking changes in PHP, and Xdebug’s master branch on GIT compiles and runs fine with PHP 8.3.

I will have to investigate the following features to see if I can add things to Xdebug to make these more useful:

  • Typed Class Constants — I could perhaps show these as part of the representation of classes during debugging.

  • Readonly Amendments — PHP’s classes can now also be marked as readonly, and having this reflected in xdebug_var_dump() and the debugging protocol would likely be useful too.

In addition to PHP 8.3 specific features, I have also done some research into Xdebug-side path mappings. As part of this, I have drafted a document “Native Xdebug Path Mappings” to collect ideas and a draft specification. This would allow for applications written in PHP to define their own path, file, and line mappings, instead of relying solely on IDEs to implement this. This is a large amount of work, and hence I am intending to “Crowd Fund” this in a specific way. I have already received pledges for about half of the time.

If you have comments, suggestions, or if your company wants to help fund this feature, please reach out, or leave comments on the document.

Business Supporter Scheme and Funding

In the last few months, three new business supporters signed up:

I have also reached out to all other existing supporters to ask for a logo, to replace their text only mentions on the Xdebug home page.

If you, or your company, would also like to support Xdebug, head over to the support page!

Besides business support, I also maintain a the original (another 1233 bytes)

PHP 8.3.0 Alpha 2 available for testing – PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

The PHP team is pleased to announce the second testing release of PHP 8.3.0, Alpha 2. This continues the PHP 8.3 release cycle, the rouch outline of which is specified in the PHP Wiki.For source downloads of PHP 8.3.0 Alpha 2 please visit download page.Please carefully test this version and report any issues found in the bug reporting system.Please DO NOT use this version in production, it is an early test version.For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file, or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes. These files can also be found in the release archive.The next release will be Alpha 3, planned for 6 July 2023.The signatures for this release can be found in the manifest or on the QA site.Thank you for helping us make PHP better!

PHP 8.3.0 Alpha 1 available for testing – PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

The PHP team is pleased to announce the first testing release of PHP 8.3.0, Alpha 1. This starts the PHP 8.3 release cycle, the rough outline of which is specified in the PHP Wiki.For source downloads of PHP 8.3.0 Alpha 1 please visit the download page.Please carefully test this version and report any issues found using the bug tracking system.Please DO NOT use this version in production, it is an early test version.For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file, or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes. These files can also be found in the release archive.The next release will be Alpha 2, planned for 22 Jun 2023.The signatures for the release can be found in the manifest or on the QA site.Thank you for helping us make PHP better.