Xdebug 3.3

I released Xdebug 3.3, and the patch releases 3.3.1 and 3.3.2.

Xdebug 3.3 brings a bunch of new features into Xdebug, such as flamegraphs.

The debugger has significant performance improvements in relation to breakpoints. And it can now also show the contents of ArrayIterator, SplDoublyLinkedList, SplPriorityQueue objects, and information about thrown exceptions.

A few bugs were present in 3.3.0, which have been addressed in 3.3.1 and 3.3.2. There is currently still an outstanding issue (or more than one), where Xdebug crashes. There are a lot of confusing reports about this, and I have not yet managed to reproduce any of them.

If you're running into a crash bug, please reach out to me.

There is also a new experimental feature: control sockets. These allow a client to instruct Xdebug to either initiate a debugging connection, or instigate a breakpoint out of band: i.e., when no debugging session is active. More about this in a later update.

Funding Platform

Last year, I made a prototype as part of a talk that I gave at NeosCon.io. In this talk I demonstrated native path mapping — configuring path mapping in/through Xdebug, without an IDE's assistance.

In collaboration with Robert from NEOS, and Luca from theAverageDev, we defined a project plan that explains all the necessary functionality and work.

Adding this to Xdebug is a huge effort, and therefore I decided to set up a way how projects like this could be funded.

There is now a dedicated Projects section linked from the home page, with a list of all the projects. The page itself lists a short description for each project.

For each project, there is a full description and a list of its generous contributors. The Native Xdebug path Mapping project is currently 85% funded. Once it is fully done, I will start the work to get this included in Xdebug 3.4. You could be part of this too!

Xdebug Videos

I have created several videos since November.

Two for Xdebug:

• Xdebug 3.3: Flamegraphs

• Xdebug 3.3: New Features in xdebug_get_function_stack()

And several for writing PHP extensions, as part of a new series:

• 1. Writing PHP Extensions: Creating a Skeleton

• 2. Writing PHP Extensions: Importing the Library, and …

• 3. Writing PHP Extensions: Implementing the rdp_simplify …

If you have any suggestions, feel free to reach out to me on Mastodon or via email.

Business Supporter Scheme and Funding

In the last month, no new business supporters signed up.

Besides business support, I also maintain a Patreon page, a profile on GitHub sponsors, as well as an OpenCollective organisation.

If you want to contribute to specific projects, you can find those on the Projects page.

Xdebug Cloud

Xdebug Cloud is the Proxy As A Service platform to allow for debugging in more scenarios, where it is hard, or impossible, to have Xdebug make a connection to the IDE. It is continuing to operate as Beta release.

Packages start at £49/month, and I have recently introduced a package for larger companies. This has a larger initial set of tokens, and discounted extra tokens.

If you want to be kept up to date with Xdebug Cloud, please sign up to the mailinglist, which I will use to send out an update not more than once a month.