PHP 8: Observability Baked Right In

Over the past two decades, the Zend Engine, which powers PHP, has evolved to accommodate specific improvements. However, the primary observability hook that tracers, profilers, and debuggers used to observe PHP’s function-call behavior has not evolved alongside the advancements made to the Zend Engine. This aging hook had an increasingly adverse effect on observed PHP application runtimes. The release of PHP 8 includes changes that bring modern observability to the PHP runtime. Our team, along with help from the PHP internals community, developed and shipped the new observer API. The observer API is designed to combat all of the negative side effects of function-call-interception hooks mentioned previously. It introduces a more generic concept to the engine: observer.