Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:115309
MIME-Version: 1.0
References: <CAF+90c8Qk4eMYCQLyX6DTsMFX_gxGg55PEKYfNXKigBpWdwBxg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAF+90c8Qk4eMYCQLyX6DTsMFX_gxGg55PEKYfNXKigBpWdwBxg@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2021 09:30:52 +0200
Message-ID: <CAOWwgp=YTiTi2kxtOTcXW4UFvva2vharhDpksjb8_L+My0xBbA@mail.gmail.com>
To: Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="00000000000094b1ed05c66f67e1"
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [Vote] New in initializers
From: nicolas.grekas+php@gmail.com (Nicolas Grekas)

--00000000000094b1ed05c66f67e1
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

Hi NIkita,

I've opened voting on https://wiki.php.net/rfc/new_in_initializers. Voting
> will close on 2021-07-14.
>
> Note that relative to the original RFC, new support is limited to parameter
> default values, attribute arguments, static variable initializers and
> global constant initializers, and not supported in property initializers
> and class constant initializers. The discussion thread
> https://externals.io/message/113347 has some extensive information on how
> we got here.
>

I voted yes and I'm happy this will come to PHP.

I realized I still have one concern that I want to share here, related to
attributes:
The RFC breaks the possibility to parse the arguments of an attribute in a
generic and safe way.
What I mean is that right now, attributes can be inspected while the
corresponding classes are not installed, due eg to a missing optional
dependency.
This behavior is what makes attributes truly declarative: one can ignore
what they don't care about. Extra semantics can be carried out by classes
without making the related attributes a mandatory dependency.

I think there is a way to preserve this behavior and that we should look
for it.

If I may propose one: we might add a new
ReflectionAttribute::getUninitializedArguments() method, that would return
the same as ReflectionAttribute::getArguments(), except that it would put a
ReflectionAttribute (or similar) instance in place of objects in the data
structure. As a corollary, we might also want to enforce that only child
classes of the Attribute class can be nested inside another Attribute (at
least if we want to reuse ReflectionAttribute as a placeholder.)

WDYT?

Nicolas

--00000000000094b1ed05c66f67e1--