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Reply-To: Levi Morrison <levi.morrison@datadoghq.com>
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2022 17:44:25 -0600
Message-ID: <CAAKU0um_zpSYMn_G4+wZORCy9mtOcWcE9LFNuXDPL35jrQdvBA@mail.gmail.com>
To: Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com>
Cc: php internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Newcomer, PHP pre-processing, Magic Constants __FILE__
 and __LINE__ override with #line like in C
From: internals@lists.php.net ("Levi Morrison via internals")

> I think you're also greatly over-estimating how large the startup cost is in practice.  It's real, certainly, but unless you have several nested microservices a well-made framework should have a fairly small overhead.

I want to share my experience that some users have very slow file I/O,
and I regularly see `file_exists` and `stat` show up in slow code
paths. This is one reason I would like to remove the warning on a
failed `include`, because then instead of `if (file_exists($file))
require $file;` or similar, you can just `include $file;` it. When I
brought it up last time, some people actually liked that it has
warnings so... I didn't move forward. Maybe there's room for
`try_include`:

[$included, $retval) = try_include($file);
if ($included) {
    // $retval will have the return value of the file
} else {
    // $retval will have a warning/error message you can work with
}

I like this quite a bit less than changing `include` to not emit a
warning, but it's not without merits:
 1. `include` still emits a warning, so nobody relying on that will be
surprised.
 2. User gets to control error handling.
 3. Can be polyfilled, it just costs a bit of performance.

Anyway, it's a bit off topic, so I'll stop here.