Poly-fill-me-up

[eileenmcnaughton]

Overview

Poly-fill-me-up

Before

We have only the 7.3 polyfill

After

symfony/polyfill-php74 for using the PHP 7.4 functions,
symfony/polyfill-php80 for using the PHP 8.0 functions,
symfony/polyfill-php81 for using the PHP 8.1 functions,
symfony/polyfill-php82 for using the PHP 8.2 functions,

Technical Details

https://github.com/symfony/polyfill/blob/main/README.md

Comments

@totten @seamuslee001 @demeritcowboy I feel like the polyfill we have has been great in terms of reducing risk of breakage across versions & allowing us to use some nice upcoming functions - I vote we pull in the rest of the current php-versions

I also probably think we should pull in more intl ones since it would have helped KonaDave with his brickmoney this week - but left out of scope

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[demeritcowboy]

Note the intl one is english only, and there was some catch-22 about it - I think because it's specified as a requirement in composer.json, so it tells you you need intl before you can install the polyfill.

But otherwise this seems ok.

[eileenmcnaughton]

OK - I think we don't need to bring intl into scope then if it's not an easy win

[totten]

I guess I'm OK with this too.

I wish we could pick/choose a bit more precisely:

• str_starts_with(), array_key_first(), array_is_list(), is_countable(), etc. -- These all seem like good, straight-up polyfills. AFAICS, they are work-a-likes in most (all?) common situations. If somebody starts using one these without giving a thought to the compatibility matrix, that's fine.
• JsonException, ValueError, Stringable, Attribute, etc. -- These are more, eh. I don't think they are drop-in replacements. If you write code on new PHP which uses one of these classes -- and if you run it on old PHP+polyfill -- then it probably won't work. These feel like specialist tools that might help some folks get out of a weird jam. ("We wrote a subclass of JsonException for our own use, and we need to avoid class-loading errors, and we don't care if json_decode() ever throws JsonException.") These polyfills might obfuscate some error conditions, and I'd just-as-soon leave them out... but I also can't point to a real/major harm of including them. And I'm sure lots of people live with them peacefully.

[eileenmcnaughton]

This has gone stale - I think it would be good to get MOP before I re-do it as it is stale-prone