Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:106536
To: internals@lists.php.net
References: <CAF+90c95GBUbbWUDhP2jW1q9uK3cnEomcwN7xWAup=PhJ0+S1Q@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2019 04:32:22 +0100
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/60.8.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <CAF+90c95GBUbbWUDhP2jW1q9uK3cnEomcwN7xWAup=PhJ0+S1Q@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Language: en-GB
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: Call for participation: Annotating internal function argument
 andreturn types
From: markyr@gmail.com (Mark Randall)
Message-ID: <php.internals-106536@news.php.net>

On 10/08/2019 11:56, Nikita Popov wrote:
> 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.

Well I tried to put together a very very ugly hack-job of a C 
tokeniser/parser that could infer types based on a combination of 
old-style ZPP and macros used to access them 
(https://github.com/marandall/cpti) but too many hours later I came to 
the conclusion that to get the job done properly would probably require 
building out a full C AST parser to be able to handle things like 
default values.

I did notice a few things in the process of making it (not least that 
IMO GD needs several hundred things changing to throw 
UnexpectedValueExceptions).

I noticed that in some cases, the internal constants don't match the 
userland constants, for example the array functions use PHP_SORT_REGULAR 
but the userland variants are just SORT_REGULAR. Which one would be used 
for the stubs? In the example from Nikita the flag names do match 
(PHP_OUTPUT_HANDLER_STDFLAGS).

I noticed you're documenting them as string|false rather than 
string|bool. I assume this is something to do with parsing "false" to be 
an error condition?

Before I re-clone the php-src repo and start editing, I just wanted to 
check if there had been any consideration to opening up the protocol 
style to add basic comments?

One thing I did see in the GD library with _php_image_create_from is 
that ZPP is different depending on logical expressions, rather than 
pre-processor statements. How should these be handled?

Mark Randall