Phpactor 18

TL;DR;: Check the 0.18.0 release notes

Phpactor 17 was released 11 months ago. After some busy months working on Phpactor I switched focus to phpbench for better or for worse and because of that there has been very little development on Phpactor for the past 6 months. During which time PHP 8.1 has been released.

Phpactor 18 does not support PHP 8.1 features (e.g. Enum) currently, but thanks to tolerant-php-parser it supports the syntax and won’t crash if you use a readonly modifier.

Some of the things in this release:

• Import all unresolved names LSP action
• Basic PHP linting for inline diagnostics (useful if phpstan/psalm are not integrated).

There is also experimental support for renaming files and function/class snippets.

Future ¶

One of the big limitations with Phpactor has become it’s type inference and reflection system provided by worse-reflection. I developed a docblock parser last year, but the effort required to integrate it with WR and update the type system was enornous and it stopped there.

A few days ago I decided to start a replacement Phpactor Flow. I might regret this, but the idea is that it will provide a complete intermediate-representation of the AST providing solid type information in addition to providing a reflection API. This development would be able to supplement and then replace Worse Reflection.

In addition I’m hoping to finally create a mono repository for 90% of the Phpactor packages to reduce the maintainence overhead.

Is 2022 the year of Phpactor on the desktop? Maybe.