PHP Eyes Swift-Style Class Extensions as Deprecation RFC Heads to Vote

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At PHP Internals this week, developer Holly Schilling introduced working prototypes for Swift-style class extensions, allowing methods to be added to classes one does not own, sparking the week's most active thread with 26 messages. Inspired partly by a Discord conversation, she published three draft RFCs with implementations, then rewrote all of them within a day after adopting a C#14-style syntax she found more defensible. Meanwhile, Gina P. Banyard locked the deprecations list for PHP 8.6, announcing a vote would begin July 20 with results expected by August 10 to align with the 8.6.0 beta 1 release. A process concern was also raised by Pierre Joye, who noted that proposals frequently cite Discord discussions as their origin despite no accessible php.net Discord reference for those following only official channels. Separately, Paul M. Jones's function autoloading proposal resurfaced for a fifth attempt, while a minor editorial debate emerged over punctuation style in deprecation notices.

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