Re: Changes to SuperGlobals for PHP 8 (was: something about session_start...)

Hi Sara, >>> On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 5:45 PM, Sara Golemon <pollita@php.net> >wrote: >>>> ftr; I'd vote in favor of several BC breaking things to do with >>>> autoglobals, among them: >>>> >>>> * Make them objects (though ArrayAccess based for less hostile BC >>>> breakage) >>>> * Make most of them read-only (offsetGet(), but no offsetSet) >>>> * Make $_SESSION[...] access produce an error or auto-start the >session Yep, this is pretty much what I had in mind when I made that passing remark, but didn't want to derail the thread. Now it has its own thread, however, I'm going to argue against myself and say why I think this is the wrong direction. ;) The obvious downside of changing request vars to read only is the huge body of code that writes to them. This isn't all bad code: as rhsoft points out, testing any code that *reads* those vars necessarily requires the harness to write to them; and a common way to *prevent* reading them is to overwrite them with empty values. More importantly, though, it's papering over the problem, which is that request information shouldn't be global. There are other barriers to a threaded, event-based SAPI becoming core and default, but a scoped request representation would be high up the todo list. There was mention a while ago of discussion in the Python community of replacing WSGI with an even more flexible interface for the HTTP2 era, supporting worker and server push models as well as request-response. The suggestion was that PHP could learn from or even collaborate on that model. Does anyone know its status? Obviously, that's a much more ambitious project, but if we're talking 10 years to phase in a breaking change, it would be good to at least attempt some future-proofing, rather than just adding a few restrictions which were missed 10 years ago, and implicitly extending the lifetime of the concept of global request data. On a slight tangent, I consider $_SERVER to be a broken pile of "we'll just shove this in here and hope for the best", and I will oppose any attempt to convert it into an object which doesn't reorganize its keys to be sane, documented, and as cross-platform as the SAPI layer can make it. :P Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]