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To: Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RFC: Traits for PHP
From: rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf)

Larry Garfield wrote:
> You also note that this mechanism has no runtime impact.  That's unfortunate, 
> because I'd find the ability to add methods to an object at runtime 
> conditionally based on some other value far more useful in my work. :-)  
> Especially since, as above, there seems to be a way to implement this 
> functionality now as-is with a little more typing, yet runtime modification 
> is still impossible without eval() and similar scary stuff.

The idea here is that we want to be able to cache opcodes, classes and
functions and optimize them out of the runtime context so the executor
can skip creating classes and functions on every single request.  A lot
of the traffic on this list over the past couple of months seems to
ignore this basic premise.  Features such as autoload and runtime object
manipulation incur a huge performance hit in the sense that they change
something that was free before and not only add the cost of the feature
itself, but it also means the object in question now can no longer be
cached and has to be created on every single request.

This doesn't mean we can't consider such features, but people need to
also consider the performance implications.

-Rasmus