In September I released a first alpha release of Xdebug 3.3 so that people trying out PHP 8.3 Release Candidates have a compatible Xdebug to test with.

This quickly followed by a second alpha version due to issues with the PECL website. Instead of mangling UTF-8 characters, it stopped accepting them altogether.

I have reintroduced the xdebug.collect_params setting, which I had removed in Xdebug 3.0. Instead of the setting, Xdebug would just always collect functions' and methods' arguments while tracing. However, some users were suggesting that this created too much information which was not always needed. With the setting restored, you can now again hide these function arguments from trace files.

As frameworks are getting more complicated, they are more likely to hit Xdebug's default xdebug.max_nesting_level limit of 256. In Xdebug 3.3, this will now be 512.

The maximum nesting level setting is now less important that it was all these years ago. The PHP engine now uses stack in a more economic way. This feature unfortunately is negated when extensions override PHP's internal execution method, which is what Xdebug has to do to capture function calls for tracing, profiling, and certain breakpoints.

In PHP 8.1 a new Observer API was added, which would allow extensions to observe user-land function calls without having to override the internal execution method. This means that the stack is used more sparingly again. It also would allow for these extensions to work better with opcache enabled.

I am currently in the process of investigating whether Xdebug can make use of this Observer API as well, while maintaining all its functionality and without BC breaks. I will keep you updated in the next monthly update.

Beyond this, I will continue to work on the features and issues on the 3.3 roadmap, without any guarantees these tickets will be implemented.

I have published one new videos in the last month:

• Xdebug 3: Using the DBGp Proxy

Let me know what you'd like to see!

You can find all previous videos on my YouTube channel.

In the last month, no new business supporters signed up.

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

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.