Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:128155
Message-ID: <596384f8-580c-4f72-ad3a-5f517be60b16@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2025 10:56:56 +0200
Precedence: bulk
MIME-Version: 1.0
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Readonly property hooks
To: Nick <php@nicksdot.dev>
Cc: php internals <internals@lists.php.net>
References: <1e8634d7-ac1a-4025-b4e2-1948aabf5251@app.fastmail.com>
 <CAMzRQTdDNsF_LPpNKUbVROTWjDbN2uDw-j2PrL3xp7qASA62GA@mail.gmail.com>
 <be533915-2b0d-460d-a5ea-76fe98fc4080@app.fastmail.com>
 <f4e4057b19a5ed9de7ad92215e78d58c@bastelstu.be>
 <cedce076-82de-4391-8a03-409690added9@app.fastmail.com>
 <bf4cc2d56f491606d3a3037af1243699@bastelstu.be>
 <13B58381-AA61-4D38-A688-DD9E367ADE6F@nicksdot.dev>
 <96e0ea70-291e-4f0a-b449-acbaef16c099@bastelstu.be>
 <76059dd0-d27a-4207-9460-658175f54a99@app.fastmail.com>
 <CAKz+gELLgydTOh_fA97Z0-XJ1FcseJHq3TTSACp9YTO43+TXpg@mail.gmail.com>
 <5A1B6BCB-97AC-4D50-A38C-C7EE394E4EE1@nicksdot.dev>
 <ba592eb4-5f93-462f-a7bd-84836e53d3c6@gmail.com>
 <C6F0BC4F-8430-4A0D-8ABF-973608095322@nicksdot.dev>
 <B3487DDF-74C1-497B-B52E-26DF2CB3AF06@nicksdot.dev>
Content-Language: en-US
In-Reply-To: <B3487DDF-74C1-497B-B52E-26DF2CB3AF06@nicksdot.dev>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
From: dossche.niels@gmail.com (Niels Dossche)

On 21/07/2025 10:29, Nick wrote:
> @Niels
> I saw you voted “no” for `set`.
> I double checked the full RFC discussion. You didn’t  participate at all until the very end. 
> Both mails were on a meta-level. None one your mails had any arguments which would justify your vote.
> I don’t understand your vote. Would you mind to elaborate?

Hi Nick

The vote for me was lost at the proposal itself, not the discussion.
Property hooks left a bit of a bitter aftertaste for me, we're still fixing opcache bugs regarding property hooks today,
and we had a particularly bad bug with the JIT where the JIT made some assumptions that were broken because hooks could override properties.
We also regularly get reports on php-src of people being confused by some of the behaviours of hooks.
Combine that with readonly, another complex feature, and I find it hard to be in favour of any of this.
While I think it's still a great feature, it also proved to be much more complex than initially thought, and it also shows that features
interact in unexpected ways with each other.

For me, the mental model of readonly is already complicated, and the hooks are too, combine the two and you get IMO unintuitive behaviour
regarding immutability etc. Anyway, this is not a new argument.

> As a new participant, I have difficulties to understand these kind of “politics” here.

For me there is no politics at play regarding my vote.
For a large chunk of RFCs, I actually don't even vote.
For this one, I decided long ago.

> What was this six weeks discussion exactly for if decisions apparently are taken in “other channels” that are not the officially documented ones?

The decision for me was made on my own.
There was one brief discussion in the PHPF Slack that Larry started, I briefly joined in there and there I told him about the mental model issue that I described above.
A few others also were not happy with the complicated mental model.

> 
> Thank you.
> 
> *Cheers,*
> Nick
> 
> 

Kind regards
Niels