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Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2021 20:38:42 +0000
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Deprecate debug_zval_dump?
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Tommins)

On 27/02/2021 19:29, tyson andre wrote:
> - Checking the difference between two runs is useful in a bug report - if counts increase or decrease after calling a function
>    that isn't supposed to modify reference counts, this makes it an obvious indicator for reference counting bugs that can be submitted
>    or requested on issue trackers such as bugs.php.net


That does sound a reasonable use case. My instinct was that those kind 
of users would be likely to use PHPDBG, or some C-level debugging 
method, but if this is common, it would be a reason to keep it in some form.


> - Dynamic values (e.g. db results) generally aren't constant values, with some exceptions.


That sounds like a bit of a tautology to me: of course dynamic values 
aren't constant. My reasoning was less about that specific case, and 
more about internal optimisations in general causing the output to 
change in hard-to-understand ways. Are we confident that after fixing 
that, another change won't make the output hard to interpret once again?


> This also seems like it's being proposed out of a desire to have fewer print functions


Actually, it was motivated by this documentation bug and many like it: 
https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=80804

The manual page still gives the incorrect advice to force a 
pass-by-reference when calling it, which hasn't been possible in any 
supported version of PHP for over 5 years.

I'm working on a rewrite of that manual page, but it's honestly quite 
hard to explain what the refcount *does* tell you. If it stays, it 
should probably be labelled more clearly as something most users will 
never need or understand.


Regards,

-- 
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]