Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:117688
User-Agent: Cyrus-JMAP/3.7.0-alpha0-591-gfe6c3a2700-fm-20220427.001-gfe6c3a27
Mime-Version: 1.0
Message-ID: <0eed8cd6-cf23-4eeb-ab3e-a851d0266081@www.fastmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <ae53f008-2c84-4964-9b13-3b9f0d00d505@www.fastmail.com>
References: <ae53f008-2c84-4964-9b13-3b9f0d00d505@www.fastmail.com>
Date: Sat, 07 May 2022 12:38:42 -0500
To: "php internals" <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Possible improvements to the Reflection functionality
From: larry@garfieldtech.com ("Larry Garfield")

On Thu, May 5, 2022, at 12:04 PM, Ollie Read wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I've been spending a lot of time in the world of PHP reflection lately, 
> which has led me to create PRs for the documentation, a bug for closure 
> attributes, and even a new method on ReflectionMethod. I've also 
> compiled a list of suggestions for various additions and improvements 
> to some parts of reflection. 
>
> You can find it here: 
> https://gist.github.com/ollieread/34c878bf120ee70f9d2a869cb7a242d1
>
> I'm looking for some feedback on the various elements and some 
> guidance, if any have merit, as to whether they're going to require any 
> sort of RFC. I'm also happy to create PRs for some of the features, if 
> not all, though I think there are definitely some beyond my current 
> knowledge. I would also be interested in hearing from anyone who also 
> has other suggestions that could be added to this.
>
> Apologies if I'm missing something, or I could have done something 
> better, this is my first interaction with this mailing list, so I am 
> also happy to receive any feedback about the best approaches and ways 
> to handle things, if necessary.

Greetings.

I've also been doing a lot of work with Reflection lately as part of https://github.com/Crell/AttributeUtils .  I agree with and support almost all of these additions.  (I'm no entirely convinced by getNumberOfAttributes(), but I don't really see a harm in it.)

There was another short thread on the list back in February?, I think, about some improvements to reflection.  We desperately need a few more well-placed interfaces and stubs for things like attributes, and even getName().  My C-fu is paltry if I'm being polite, but I'm happy to help with process and RFC writing/documentation.  The Reflection API is badly in need of some love.

In practice, I think most of these would require RFCs.  The question is whether they're better as a bunch of stand-alone RFCs or one big "clean up Reflection" RFC or a series of "clustered" RFCs.  I'm not sure what's most palatable to folks these days.

--Larry Garfield