Compilation errors in PHP: why are they still a problem?

Programming in PHP has always been a bit of a challenge, but fortunately, it has undergone many changes for the better. Do you remember the times before PHP 7, when almost every error meant a fatal error, instantly terminating the application? In practice, this meant that any error could completely stop the application without giving the programmer a chance to catch it and respond appropriately. Tools like Tracy used magical tricks to visualize and log such errors. Fortunately, with the arrival of PHP 7, this changed. Errors now throw exceptions like Error, TypeError, and ParseError, which can be easily caught and handled.

However, even in modern PHP, there is a weak spot where it behaves the same as in its fifth version. I am talking about errors during compilation. These cannot be caught and immediately lead to the termination of the application. They are E_COMPILE_ERROR level errors. PHP generates around two hundred of them. It creates a paradoxical situation where loading a file with a syntax error in PHP, such as a missing semicolon, throws a catchable ParseError exception. However, if the code is syntactically correct but contains a compilation-detectable error (like two methods with the same name), it results in a fatal error that cannot be caught.

try {
    require 'path_to_file.php';
} catch (ParseError $e) {
    echo "Syntactic error in PHP file";
}

Unfortunately, we cannot internally verify compilation errors in PHP. There was a function php_check_syntax(), which, despite its name, detected compilation errors as well. It was introduced in PHP 5.0.0 but quickly removed in version 5.0.4 and has never been replaced since. To verify the correctness of the code, we must rely on a command-line linter:

php -l file.php

From the PHP environment, you can verify code stored in the variable $code like this:

$code = '... PHP code to verify ...';
$process = proc_open(
    PHP_BINARY . ' -l',
    [['pipe', 'r'], ['pipe', 'w'], ['pipe', 'w']],
    $pipes,
    null,
    null,
    ['bypass_shell' => true],
);
fwrite($pipes[0], $code);
fclose($pipes[0]);
$error = stream_get_contents($pipes[1]);
if (proc_close($process) !== 0) {
    echo 'Error in PHP file: ' . $error;
}

However, the overhead of running an external PHP process to verify one file is quite large. But good news comes with PHP version 8.3, which will allow verifying multiple files at once:

php -l file1.php file2.php file3.php