The PHP Podcast 2026.11.12
1 hr 2 min
PHP Podcast – November 12, 2026 Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon & Holly Schilling A surprise RC7, assembly-level ABI detective work, Claude landing commits in php-src, a survey on why nobody upgrades, Portuguese wiring codes, and the corporate spy saga that ate your RAM. Just an “off week.” The Surprise RC7 and the Last-Minute Regression Joe, serving as a first-time release manager alongside Matteo Beccati, walked through why PHP 8.6.0 RC7 appeared seemingly out of nowhere. RC6 was tagged on the usual Tuesday cadence, but a regression needed to land, leaving the team a choice: ship 8.6.0 GA with a known regression where working 8.5 code would break on upgrade, or throw another RC. As Joe put it, he’d rather apologize for a last-minute RC than apologize for a regression on GA. The decision was made easier by the fact that packagers like Remy need lead time to rebuild extensions. Because the team committed to an extra RC, they were also able to slip in a few nice-to-haves, including some use-after-free OpenSSL fixes that were all public knowledge and nothing security-embargoed. Sara fully endorsed the “when in doubt, add an RC” philosophy, pointing out that releases happen on Thursdays precisely so the weekend acts as a buffer. A December GA wouldn’t be the end of the world either — uptime-conscious shops wait until January anyway, giving the packages and the public beta crowd time to shake out surprises. Holly reminded everyone: this is a release candidate, not a release. Don’t run it in production. Reading Assembly to Hunt an ABI Break The RC saga tied back to an earlier mistake: the ABI version bump that was missed in RC3 because of the CVE scramble on the 21st. That meant RC3 and RC4 could have had nasty extension conflicts, and anyone seeing weird extension behavior on those builds was likely hitting the ABI break that wasn’t caught until RC5. Joe showed off Daniel Scherzer’s blog post, which drops down into the actual assembly and diffs the obj-dump o...
