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Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2011 14:32:36 -0700
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To: Hannes Landeholm <landeholm@gmail.com>
Cc: Lester Caine <lester@lsces.co.uk>, internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [VOTE] Weak References
From: chrisstocktonaz@gmail.com (Chris Stockton)

Hello,

On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Hannes Landeholm <landeholm@gmail.com> wro=
te:
> =A0I've talked to Etienne and he still believes we should vote on this so=
 the
> vote is still up. He just replied to quickly. If the vote fails the patch
> can still be implemented in a PECL extension. There's no point canceling =
the
> vote or the RFC - it's still valid and ongoing, and there is still time f=
or
> discussion.
>
> .. snip ...

I think at this point everyone is well aware that you would like this
feature implemented.

I would like to make a couple points here, first I is that PECL is not
a place for a extension to rot, that statement makes absolutely no
sense to me. PDO I recall years ago getting from PECL, Http a
extension I often use, was recently on this list if I recall to be
moved into the core. I'm sure there are plenty of people on this list
that were part of extension's PECL -> CORE lifecycles that could add
several more examples to the list. I believe PECL Would be a great
place for something like this that was is entirely understood or has
overwhelming support in my opinion. I am really not sure how
comfortable I am with a feature as new as this being in the PHP on my
servers. Some form of incubation, testing and use feedback only makes
sense to me.

Second I would like to talk a little bit about weak references for
those who are not familiar with them or have thus far only read your
very strong pro-opinion. I would like to make it very clear with the
simple fact that weak references are not required, ever by any
language. They are a convenience, not a solution to a unsolvable
problem. I believe that if anything weak references encourage laziness
in design, it causes the referential integrity that I am accustomed to
is broken, and can often lead to more code and checks then it
relieves. It is very easy to run into unexpected bugs and in a
language like PHP, where you don't get a NPE when you try to access a
NULL method of a non object, you get a fatal error, this doesn't seem
very appealing to me. Only under very specific cases of caching
patterns as you have previously mentioned is such a pattern even
recognized to -have a place for use that isn't just plain wrong- -not
a requirement- by me.

In PHP, I believe a web or cli app that uses enough resources to bomb
memory limits on a server, needs to be re-factored. I have definitely
written multi-process PHP daemons that go to disk or over the network
for taxing operations that need cached and had very little trouble
with rudimentary memory management patterns, so from my perspective I
can't really see why given the toolset PHP provides that this is such
a problem.

This is just my opinion, I don't have a strong opposition to this
feature, anything "new" to PHP I usually get excited about, I simply
wanted to give a few counter arguments as the fact that this feature
is being presented as a dire and long over due missing feature to the
language is a bit dramatic. Not saying its useless and doesn't belong
in PHP or I would never want it to exists, I just would hate to see
something rushed through that didn't get a bit of testing and typical
QA from a language that affects millions of people.

-Chris