WeakMap vs PECL WeakMap

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 2:58 PM Benjamin Morel benjamin.morel@gmail.com
wrote:

Hi Internals,

A year ago, when WeakRef was being proposed, some objections
https://externals.io/message/104014#104068 related to the PECL Weakref
package https://www.php.net/manual/fr/book.weakref.php had lead the RFC
author, Joe Watkins, to rename WeakRef to WeakReference to avoid conflicts.

However, the latest addition from Nikita Popov, WeakMap
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/weak_maps, did not take the same argument into
account, therefore conflicting with PECL WeakMap
https://www.php.net/manual/fr/class.weakmap.php.

First of all, how will this be handled in the docs?

Now that we have a conflict on WeakMap anyway, and now that the PECL
package has been deprecated, and provided that the conflict can be
gracefully handled in the docs, is there anything that prevents
WeakReference from being called WeakRef?

Could we have both names in PHP 8, like WeakReference being an alias for
WeakRef?

I don't see a point in renaming the class now that the WeakReference name
has been chosen. I don't agree with the reasons why it was picked, but
it's not like "WeakReference" is a bad name in itself. That's what Java
calls it as well, for example.

Regards,
Nikita