A week after two critical bugs in PHP's own engine, someone asked the internals list to stop. No new features and no cosmetic deprecations, until PHP has a formal spec and four independent implementations, written in formal-methods frameworks. Four people who work on PHP replied. One of them called fixing PHP's bugs a money problem.

Hello world, it's Thursday, October 29, 2026, and here's what happened This Week in PHP Internals. 15 stories this week, so let's get into it. But first,

AI made building software easy, and owning it hard. Scalpels installs open source apps into your own Laravel Cloud or Forge account in one click, so your data never leaves your infrastructure. There are 15 apps in the catalog , from a private Composer registry to a mail trap for staging. The Free plan is zero dollars, forever, and Laravel bills you directly for the hosting. There's even a guide to patching PHP on your own servers.…