{"id":3883,"date":"2022-05-19T11:20:21","date_gmt":"2022-05-19T11:20:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the-codest.localhost\/blog\/why-do-we-need-symfony-polyfill-and-why-we-shouldnt\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T14:07:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T14:07:09","slug":"why-do-we-need-symfony-polyfill-and-why-we-shouldnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecodest.co\/en\/blog\/why-do-we-need-symfony-polyfill-and-why-we-shouldnt\/","title":{"rendered":"Why do we need Symfony Polyfill (… and why we shouldn’t)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In most modern PHP<\/a> projects<\/strong>, you’ll notice a heavy dependency on the Symfony Polyfill<\/a> library. In this article, we will explain not only how it works and how it relates to Symfony projects<\/strong>, but we will also go deeper into the idea of the problem it tries to solve.<\/p>\n

Little bit of history<\/h2>\n

PHP<\/strong> was in a bad shape for quite a long time. It was 2005 when Andrei Zmievski started a project<\/a> to bring native Unicode support for PHP<\/strong> due to mixed reviews and many concerns that PHP<\/strong> is going in the wrong way. Development of PHP<\/strong> 6.x started. But it was never finished – and that’s a story for another day. 10 years later, somewhere between 2014 and 2015, Dmitry Stogov, Xinchen Hui, and Nikita Popov started phpng<\/code> – project that optimized and refactored the internal Zend Engine used by PHP<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

>_ The PHP 7 was born<\/em><\/h4>\n

And for the past years, PHP<\/strong> is growing faster than ever, currently at stable version 8.1.<\/p>\n

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Due to the rapid development of new features in language not only developers had to adapt to those changes but also infrastructure and hosting service provides.<\/p>\n

To ensure that we, developers, can use the newest and best features of our beloved programming language Symfony Polyfill<\/strong> project was born.<\/p>\n

Symfony Polyfill and it’s function<\/h2>\n
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This project backports features found in the latest PHP versions<\/strong> and provides compatibility layers for some extensions and functions. It is intended to be used when portability across PHP versions<\/strong> and extensions is desired.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is a pure description of Symfony Polyfill<\/a> but what does that mean? <\/p>\n

Due to the rapidly evolving PHP language<\/strong> and the out-of-step software customization of ISPs, most developers have been faced with a simple choice:<\/p>\n