It's been over two months since I started a research on Twitter about the things that developers would like to be added or improved in the next major PHP release:

It had a surprisingly long reach, inspiring developers, prominent experts, community representatives to express their opinion through more than a hundred responses.

It would be a waste to leave such a valuable data in the form of a raw and fuzzy Twitter thread, so I finally found some time to turn it into something more useful. I created a spreadsheet containing a list of proposals and their number of votes:

Click here for a full, more transparent spreadsheet / chart

The list was processed as follows:

  • duplicate proposals have been merged into one so that the final list is unique (identifying duplicates was not an easy task, so some suggestions may be unintentionally omitted),
  • features that are already implemented or will be implemented in some of the upcoming PHP 7.x releases have been omitted,
  • the proposals relating to PHP extensions have been omitted,
  • some unrealistic and jokey proposals, such as removing -> notation, have been omitted,
  • the total number of votes for each proposal is the sum of the number of likes for the proposal and the number of responses in which the proposal was found.

The results clearly shout that PHP developers are eager for stronger object-oriented interface, multi-threading and asynchronous processing, strict typing, as well as some syntactic sugar additions following the example of other languages.

I would like to thank everyone who contributed in making this list, either by sending their own proposal or voting for the existing one. Let your PHP 8 wishes come true!