Interview with Niels Dossche - Keyvan's blog

Niels Dossche, a PhD student at Ghent University in Belgium, is responsible for the major DOM improvements introduced in PHP 8.4. These bring HTML5 support, CSS selectors, and modern DOM features to PHP.

I spoke with Niels to learn more about how these changes came about. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I have worked with PHP before, but not in a professional way. I think about ten years ago I played a bit with PHP, made some small websites just for myself, as a hobby. And then I did nothing with it. I started studying at university, like seven years ago. When I graduated, I got the opportunity to work as a researcher at the university. And indirectly through my research, I became involved in PHP. So how that happened is that I do research in static analysis. I don't know if you're familiar with it...

Right. So, like analyzing the code without executing it to find bugs upfront. I do research on that, and I apply it to C and C++ code. So at one point, I was thinking, well, now I need to actually choose some open source projects to test this on, so I can report the results in a publication. And I was thinking, what are some security-critical, complex C code bases? I thought, well, PHP is one of those, maybe I should get myself familiar with how PHP works internally. Then I can run my analysis tools on it. So I just cloned the PHP repository, started playing with it. Then I noticed some issues, small ones but issues that seemed easy to fix. And I just started sending pull requests to the PHP repository.

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