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Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2015 13:14:32 +0100
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To: Dmitry Stogov <dmitry@zend.com>
Cc: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>, Guilherme Blanco <guilhermeblanco@gmail.com>, 
	Pierrick CHARRON <pierrick@webstart.fr>, Alexander Lisachenko <lisachenko.it@gmail.com>, 
	Pierre Joye <pierre.php@gmail.com>, Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com>, Andi Gutmans <andi@zend.com>, 
	Joe Watkins <pthreads@pthreads.org>, Yasuo Ohgaki <yohgaki@ohgaki.net>, 
	Sebastian Bergmann <sebastian@php.net>, Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com>, 
	Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=047d7bfcf00066f42c050f338749
Subject: Re: Annotations in PHP7
From: nikita.ppv@gmail.com (Nikita Popov)

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On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 12:07 PM, Dmitry Stogov <dmitry@zend.com> wrote:

> hi,
>
> During discussion of different ways of implementing "Design by Contract"
> we got an idea of using annotations.
>
> BTW: annotations are useful by their own and may be used for different
> purposes. Support for annotations was proposed long time ago:
>
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/annotations
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/annotations-in-docblock
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/reflection_doccomment_annotations
>
> HHVM already implemented similar concept
>
> http://docs.hhvm.com/manual/en/hack.attributes.php
>
> I made a quick and dirty PoC that shows how we may implement annotations
> in PHP7 and how powerful they may be :
> https://gist.github.com/dstogov/dbf2a8f46e43719bd2c2
>
> The test there is self explainable. Of course, annotations just provide a
> way to add metadata, but doesn't define attribute names or the ways they
> are going to be used. Only Reflection API to read.
>
> There are still a lot of technical problems that have to be solved.
> Right now, we just need to answer a question - if we like this in PHP7?
> Thought and opinions are welcome...
>
> Thanks. Dmitry.
>

Hi Dmitry!

I think this is a great idea, but we should postpone it to PHP 7.1.
Especially if you want to make this AST based (which would require both
stabilizing the AST we return for expressions and having APIs to do codegen
based on the AST) it will require a lot of work both for design and
implementation. I don't think it's realistic to include a high-quality
implementation in PHP 7.

As this does not have any BC concerns that I can see, I think it would be
safer to move this to PHP 7.1, when we will have more time to carefully
design this.

Nikita

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