I spent some time making sure that Xdebug will be ready for PHP 8.4, once that comes out later in the year. There are always some incompatibilities, such as the new frameless calls and some deprecations.

I also did a deep dive into supporting a potential large change into the way PHP handles the exit keyword. There is a proposal to change that from a language instruction to an actual function, but this impacts Xdebug fairly significantly — it uses the instruction for path and branch analysis, and to make sure profiling files get stored on disk in full. At the moment, it is unsure whether this change will be adopted.

Beyond preparatory work for PHP 8.4, I also spend some time on improving the out-of-band socket communication support to make it easier for IDEs to use. This work will continue to be ongoing for a while.

I have started on the Native Xdebug Path Mapping project.

As this is a separately funded project, I don't classify the hours that I worked on this in "Xdebug Hours". I also publish a separate report on the project page.

As an exception, I am including it here:

In this first month, or rather, the last week of July, I have been working on setting up a testing framework for the parser. Previously Xdebug only had tests in PHPT form, PHP's standard for testing syntax and functions. However, this is rather more an integration test framework, as it compares the output of a script with an expected output.

For low-level features, such as testing the implementation of the parser that parses the path mapping files, PHPT tests are not suitable. Instead, the testing framework tests the return values and generated structures directly, without PHP having to be involved. The CppUTest framework that I use for this, is much more similar to PHPUnit. It is also a framework that I have used for testing timelib, the library that powers PHP and MongoDB's date/time functionality.

Beyond the testing framework, I have also made a start on the parser itself. It can currently parse the remote_prefix and local_prefix stanzas, as well as mapping lines, although it does not distinguish between directory maps, file maps, or line maps yet, nor does it apply the prefix stanzas yet.

I have created no new videos since last month, but you can see all the previous ones on my channel.

If you have any suggestions, feel free to reach out to me on Mastodon or via email.

In the last month, one new business supporter signed up:

• Clever Age.

Besides business support, I also maintain a Patreon page, a profile on GitHub sponsors, as well as an OpenCollective organisation.

If you want to contribute to specific projects, you can find those on the Projects page.

Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.

Packages start at £49/month, and I have recently introduced a package for larger companies. This has a larger initial set of tokens, and discounted extra tokens.

If you want to be kept up to date with Xdebug Cloud, please sign up to the mailinglist, which I will use to send out an update not more than once a month.