Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:94931
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain gmail.com designates 74.125.82.49 as permitted sender)
To: internals@lists.php.net
References: <CADqTB_gBFM_2yNDQemPs68Fab4Hbd8pGj38a3-HSQ+CRcnDyvA@mail.gmail.com>
 <CAF+90c9td1bt2zCbGfXdbGtFO-4qhJuJnkAEdsQDaH+wATDOmA@mail.gmail.com>
 <CAFMT4NpFBCJW1x3Yxz3FDx+6JGcdaGXZuBseEOaxXG0fnFHV0g@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <de01a2d6-f03a-834d-b211-213a6f4cca1e@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2016 15:56:11 +0100
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/45.2.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <CAFMT4NpFBCJW1x3Yxz3FDx+6JGcdaGXZuBseEOaxXG0fnFHV0g@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Function auto-loading
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

On 08/08/2016 15:36, Levi Morrison wrote:
>> I feel like the problem here did not get across properly. Calling the
>> autoloader if a global function with the name exists will totally kill
>> performance. This means that every call to strpos() or any of the other
>> functions in the PHP standard library will have to go through the
>> autoloader first, unless people use fully qualified names (which,
>> currently, they don't). This is completely out of the question.
>>
>
> Interesting. I come to a different conclusion: this a great opportunity to
> get developers to use the fully qualified names. Performance is an
> incredibly motivating force even in many situations when it shouldn't be.

An example just to focus the mind:

namespace Lovely\New\Code;

class Blah {
     function __construct(array $foo) {
          foreach ( $foo as $item ) {
               if ( strpos('blah', $item) !== 0 ) {
                   // ...
               }
          }
      }
}


This will *repeatedly* call the function autoloader for 
"Lovely\New\Code\strpos". The fully qualified name in this case is 
"\strpos".

I think saying "add a backslash in front of your function names to avoid 
them being slow" will just lead to lots of "lol wtf php sux".

If we wanted to make the \ mandatory, then the name resolution for 
functions could have had no fallback, just like class names. The reasons 
for having that fallback presumably still apply, so it doesn't make 
sense to now declare it "broken by design, please avoid".

On the other hand, saying "you can autoload functions from another 
namespace using qualified names or 'use function'" sidesteps the 
fallback issue, and sounds like a reasonable, non-BC-breaking, feature.

Regards,
-- 
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]