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Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2023 22:58:57 +0200
Message-ID: <CAL0xaBFaAzpQcjA4V55CuPfi7yTMEpAJNW-s2Z+BOHsZQHPtBw@mail.gmail.com>
To: Jordan LeDoux <jordan.ledoux@gmail.com>
Cc: Robert Landers <landers.robert@gmail.com>, "G. P. B." <george.banyard@gmail.com>, 
	Alexander Pravdin <alex.pravdin@interi.co>, internals@lists.php.net
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="00000000000069e352060c92ad44"
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Proposal: Arbitrary precision native scalar type
From: arvids.godjuks@gmail.com (Arvids Godjuks)

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On Fri, 15 Dec 2023 at 22:32, Jordan LeDoux <jordan.ledoux@gmail.com> wrote=
:

> On Fri, Dec 15, 2023 at 12:14=E2=80=AFAM Robert Landers <landers.robert@g=
mail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
> > nobody will likely ever try this again, at least in the foreseeable
> > future. With comments like that, there is simply no way forward.
> > There's no convincing (at least via email) and by that point, it's too
> > late anyway, they already voted but didn't even show up for the
> > discussion that happened for weeks. Literally wasting everyone's time.
> > The only way we'd ever get something like this passed is if someone
> > proposes an RFC that prevents people from voting based on
> > political/personal reasons and restricts voting "no" to technical
> > reasons only; or some voters reopen one of the original RFC's for a
> > revote and leave it in the "Pending Implementation" section as needing
> > an implementation.
> >
> > The fact that people can and do vote "no" for no other reason than
> > they "don't like it" or they "don't want to use it" leaves a bad taste
> > in my mouth.
> >
>
> Okay, so I'm probably the most affected by this, considering we're
> discussing my proposal which was declined and I spent over 400 hours of
> work on it prior to the vote. So please understand where I'm coming from
> when I say this: I firmly believe that people should be allowed to vote n=
o
> on an RFC simply because they feel that it "doesn't belong in PHP". That =
is
> a voter taking a position on what the language is for, how it should be
> designed from a more broad perspective, and I think it's important to hav=
e
> that in order to maintain a productive language that does its job well.
>
> The main issue I have discovered through this experience is that some
> people have difficulty or lack the experience necessary to separate an
> opinion about the language design philosophy from what would be personall=
y
> useful to *them*. That is a problem, but it's a problem that is just part
> of working collaboratively with humans. It's not unique to this group, to
> PHP, or to this situation.
>
> The reason, for everyone else reading, that this is relevant to the curre=
nt
> discussion about a scalar decimal type is that this is likely to face som=
e
> similar pushback. This email will go out to hundreds of people, but only =
a
> few are going to reply, and most of the people currently participating in
> this discussion do not have voting rights, so this RFC if it's worked on
> will have to be developed without the feedback of the people who actually
> decide whether it goes into the language.
>
> A scalar decimal type will be extremely useful for certain types of
> applications, foundationally critical to other types of applications, and
> completely unused for others. A big part of writing this RFC would be
> explaining to the people who do not work on any applications that benefit
> why it would be good to include it in the language anyway.
>
> A scalar decimal type would create a hard dependency on libmpdec, which I
> also expect to be something that needs to be addressed. MPDec is licensed
> under the Simplified BSD License. I *think* it could be bundled if needed=
,
> but it couldn't be relicensed with the PHP License itself.
>
> Jordan
>

Jordan has highlighted good points that probably should be addressed and in
general, I think, this project will take a while, so I would settle in for
the long haul here and think things through and reach out to people who
actively work and maintain the PHP core. There have been recent instances
of people fitting in and passing things and then regretting the way it was
done (*cought* readonly rfc *cought* ).

As for the idea itself - I fully support it. A decimal type would be
invaluable in quite a lot of places and a lot of PHP apps are handling
money and other precise numbers that really would benefit from a proper
decimal type (right now in most cases people just do it with integers or
use libraries like brick/money, but that's only a subset covered).
This is really adding a new type into the engine, so this is going to be a
big undertaking and this probably will require the work to go into PHP 9
because extensions probably are going to be affected and will need to be
upgraded to handle the new type. Especially PDO and database drivers. This
is far from a small project.


--=20

Arv=C4=ABds Godjuks
+371 26 851 664
arvids.godjuks@gmail.com
Telegram: @psihius https://t.me/psihius

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