PHP has come a long way from being an interpreted scripting language for home web pages to a pretty fast object-oriented compiled language running the most powerful websites on the Internet. As part of its performance boost are various compiler optimizations. In this blog post, we'll focus on a subtle feature that makes applications automatically faster (although just slightly): optimizing native function invocation.
Test Explorer in Visual Studio Code opens the door to all your PHPUnit and Pest PHP tests. You can browse and filter test suites, test classes, test cases, and data sets. Run, debug, profile, or navigate to any test. You can enable automatic testing on changes, browse test history, and see detailed diffs of actual and expected results. Let me show you how.
Debugging PHP can sometimes feel like chasing ghosts. Even experienced developers often encounter the same recurring issues, especially when using Xdebug or IDE-integrated debuggers. Here’s a practical guide to the most common pitfalls—and how to solve them.
We're thrilled to announce that Zed IDE is now officially supported by our PHP Tools extension! 🎉
PHP Extension works seamlessly with Cursor—the popular AI-powered code editor. With the PHP extension, you get a full suite of features, including code completion, intelligent code actions, an integrated debugger, advanced syntax highlighting, and effortless navigation. But that’s not all! It also offers workspace-wide code analysis and detailed diagnostics. Plus, these features are fully compatible with the AI chat agent, creating a powerful coding experience.
Performance always matters. Your Laravel application might be beautifully designed and written, but there's always the possibility of hidden bottlenecks. Is it unnecessarily slow? Can it be optimized further? Sometimes, a single function can consume most of your CPU time. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to profile your Laravel application in Visual Studio Code to uncover and address these issues.
The PHP editor with PHP Tools extension provides vast array of useful code actions - either code fixes or inline code refactorings. What if you always prefer the fix or the specific refactor (like simplifying ?: operator or removing unnecessary ?> tag whenever possible).
The PHP extension for Visual Studio Code comes with an exhaustive code formatting built-in (see docs). There is a vast array of parameters to configure your custom code style, predefined code styles for common standards, and all of this with ability to only format selection, format-on-type, format-on-save, and newly - format multiple PHP files at once, with preview.
Version 1.42 of the PHP extension for VS Code includes WordPress Stub. What does it mean? The editor will recognize all the standard WordPress functions, constants, and classes. It provides code analysis, IntelliSense, AI inline code suggestions, and type analysis.
PHP extension for Visual Studio Code comes with tons of code actions and code diagnostics! One of them sorts and removes unused uses:
