Phpactor 17

Last modified 2022/09/14 11:14

TL;DR;: Check the 0.17.0 release notes

It’s been over 6 months since the release of Phpactor 16. Time really files! I planned to release Phpactor 17 last August - but, well. It didn’t happen and in the meantime there has been a huge amount of activity in develop.

PHP 8 Support and Github Actions

Phpactor can now be installed with the PHP 8 runtime, some necessary fixes were made to support new PHP 8 syntax and some new features:

  • Named parameter completion
  • Promoted property support

All libraries have been migrated from Travis to Github actions with the help of Maestro

No develop branch

I’m retiring the develop branch and from now on everything will be developed in master. The documentation has been updated to suggest using tagged versions and there will be a warning displayed for users still using develop.

It can often be the case that develop is more stable than master and I want to release more often and with less overhead.

If you install Phpactor in VIM with Plug then update to:

Plug 'phpactor/phpactor', {'for': 'php', 'tag': '*', 'do': 'composer install --no-dev -o'}

Language Server

  • New LSP protocol library transpiled from typescript: We were using the felixfbecker/php-language-server-protocol. package, but this was very out of date and updating it was no easy task. The Phpactor LSP is now transpiled directly from the VS code protocol.

  • Document symbols: Support for showing code outlines.

  • Symbol highlighting: Symbols of the same type and value are highlighted automatically.

  • Code actions - several code actions have been implemented (i.e. automated refactorings).

  • More stuff, probably

Create Class Create class code action

Create Class Outline view in VS Code

VS Code Support

Phpactor’s development has been primarily focussed on VIM, but there has been more feedback for when it’s used with VS code (thanks @BladeMF) and various fixes have been made to make this a better experience.

Create Class Symbol Highlighting in VS Code

The VS code extension is here it’s not currently on the marketplace and needs to be installed manually.

The Future

Generics and better Docblock support

After this release is out I will merge the new docblock parser librray. It is a lossless docblock parser which records positions and supports generics syntax.

The current Phpactor docblock parser is very primitive - and wouldn’t scale to generic support. A few years back I tried to implement the PHPStan PHPDoc parser, but it was much slower and it did not capture offsets (useful for editing docblocks).

The new library is marginally faster than the PHPStan parser, but still 4x slower than the original library. This is compensated however by an unrelated performance fix which makes parsing faster in heavy cases, so we make docblock parsing slower but overall I’m hoping things will be faster!

Finally it should be fairly trivial to add support for indexing docblock symbols and including them in searches.

Generic support will require some medium-to-large refactoring in worse-reflection - but will really push Phpactor’s completion abilities to the next level (it’s possible we even get there before PHPStorm 😁).

/**
 * @param Foobar<Barfoo<int[], int[]>,string, Baz> $foobar
 */

Phpactor should finally have real generic support

Language Server Rename Support

Renaming is currently only supported via. the VIM plugin and the CLI but @BladeMF has already done some great work implementing rename support in the language server - so fingers crossed that we can get this in soon.

Initially it will support variable, class and member renaming, but finally also listening to file-move events enabling automatic renaming when moving files in the editors file explorer.

Wrapping Up

That’s it. You’re probably using develop already, so it’s time to switch to master as that’s where everything will happen now.

Thankyou to everybody that contributed to this release.