> would it be very wrong to assume this just a case of a bystander starting a discussion that didn't really catch on with any of the active maintainers?

Anthony (ircmaxell) contributed some patches to the past few major releases (including the new password API and PBKDF functions) and is well-respected by a large number of PHP developers.

He's also proposed nearly a dozen RFCs including working patches, most of which include incremental but major feature improvements. He and some of the others are trying to improve PHP as a language.

The problem is that there are a handful of people that do not want language changes, think that some changes are confusing for developers, and are generally not actually able to understand the use case behind things, like, oh, I dunno, named parameters. So instead of having a well-reasoned discussion, they basically shout the proposal down.

Thankfully the RFC and voting process can bypass the volume of their arguments, but not always.

I've read about the toxicity of php-internals so many times, without any opposing views, that i'm quite willing to believe it. However, I'm not convinced other projects that aren't run by a benevolent dictator fare any better. This is just how projects get when everyone on the internet can throw their 2 cents into the game.

No. This is a big guy in internals. Sad to see him step back like this, but totally understandable.

Internals suffers from simply having too many voices. As with all things you need a leader that is reasonable and can push things in the right direction.

For example, I don't think I've seen a constructive discussion on having some kind of object literal in the language to replace something like

    $obj = (object)['prop' => 'val', ...];

Given the responses cited at the end of the post, I would assume that the author was previously a contributor of some significance to the project.

I just grepped the php-5.4.19 source and the only mention I found was for a bug reported and fixed in some earlier version, though.

Doing a `git shortlog --author "Anthony Ferrara"` in php-src/master pulls up 72 separate commits.