The PHP 7 Revolution: Return Types and Removed Artifacts

[tony_marston404]

@TomB

There’s no way to accurately answer that. However, it’s irrelevant. The fact is, PHP does have a fight on its hands here and it needs to keep up. PHPNG simply wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t being pushed by Hack.

So the difference between a language that is used on 240 million website and one that is used on less than 24 is irrelevant? A fight between an elephant and a mosquito will not be much of a fight.

@TomB

Needless to say, as developers this is a good thing because we get much needed improvements to the language we use every day.

I have seen the list of improvements in the internals list, and I am in favour of all of them. However, none of these “improvements” require the removal of PHP 4 constructors.

@TomB

Define “inefficient”. Where are your benchmarks to prove the saving that the removal of PHP 4 constructors would bring?

if (method_exists($class, '__construct')) $class->__construct();

is always going to run faster than

if (method_exists($class, '__construct')) $class->__construct();
else if (method_exists($class, $class->name')) $class->{$class->name}();

You could scan the class once and store the result of the if statement (using extra memory for each defined class) or do it each time an object is instantiated. Either way it’s going to result in either higher memory usage or more processing

It sounds like this problem could be fixed by https://wiki.php.net/rfc/default_ctor if it were amended to include (the still supported and as yet undeprecated) PHP 4 constructors. You see, it is possible to fi the problem without resorting to a BC break.

@TomB

Define “minimal”. What are your sources?

I’ve looked at probably hundreds of PHP libraries over the last few years, I’ve not seen PHP4 constructors used once. Have a look at PHP projects on github, I bet you can’t find even 10 of the thousands on there that are using PHP4 constructors (and are not clearly using the php4 object model, e.g var $var)

Oh I see. Your statement is based solely on the numbers of scripts that you have personally seen. Are you aware of how many PEAR components were written for PHP 4 and have never been updated to use PHP 5 constructors? I have seen posts from other developers in other forums who have large applications which were written using PHP 4 constructors and who simply don’t have the time to refactor them.