Things have progressed slowly since the last update.

Bug Fixes

Working with my teammates has yielded a few opportunities for bug fixes.

One key architectural difficulty of BLIS is that it has to run under two different versions of PHP, 5.4 and 5.61. The primary limitation is that BLIS uses an old Windows application package called Server2Go, and the version of PHP that runs with that is 5.4. 5.6 is the earliest version of PHP I could successfully get running in a reasonably modern Docker container that is still mostly compatible with v5.4 which we must use.

Last semester, someone wrote some code that looked like this:

$my_array = [];

In so-called “modern” languages, [] is an empty array literal, so this is functionally equivalent to creating a new array. Well, apparently this isn’t valid code in PHP 5.4, but it is in 5.6. In PHP 5.4, the correct way to do this is:

$my_array = array();

Async Communication

As with any project, the biggest difficulty in my experience is stakeholder communication. In this case it is hampered in part by my own slow progress. Unfortunately, BLIS is quite fractured, so any new feature or addition requires its own bespoke treatment, which I’ve found has impeded my progress slightly.

  1. And yes, both of these versions are obscenely old.