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Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2019 12:56:16 +0200
Message-ID: <CAF+90c95GBUbbWUDhP2jW1q9uK3cnEomcwN7xWAup=PhJ0+S1Q@mail.gmail.com>
To: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Call for participation: Annotating internal function argument and
 return types
From: nikita.ppv@gmail.com (Nikita Popov)

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Hi,

Lack of type information for internal functions in Reflection is a
long-standing issue. In PHP 8 we finally have all the necessary technical
groundwork done to support argument and return type annotations on internal
functions at scale.

The only thing left is to actually add those type annotations ... to many
hundreds of functions. This is something everyone can help with, as it does
not need expertise in C.

I've opened a sample PR to show the process:
https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/4499

Here, we take some existing arginfo structures in basic_functions.c and
convert them into stubs in basic_functions.stub.php. We can take the
argument names from the existing arginfo. To figure out the types, we need
to look at the implementation (the php.net documentation tends to lie about
details).

For example, the first function, set_time_limit is defined in
https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/172c71980df0fe4c9d62c3365f0a2cdb139e3e86/main/main.c#L1501.
We see that it accepts an "l" parameter, which is an int. We see that it
uses RETVAL_TRUE and RETVAL_FALSE, which means the return value is a bool.

Once this is done, we need to auto-generate new arginfo data. If you have a
development setup, this is done automatically when running "make".
Otherwise, it's possible to manually run "php scripts/dev/gen_stub.php
ext/standard/basic_functions.stub.php".

Any help would be appreciated :)

Regards,
Nikita

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