Re: [RFC] Reflection for references

A few issues with the RFC so far: * ReflectionReference seems to be designed around arrays only: maybe ReflectionArrayKeyReference or such? * Can the getId() return type be restricted to either int or string? Why is it a union type right now? Technical limitation? * ReflectionReference#__construct() should be private, since it is unusable anyway * fromArrayElem => fromArrayElement * is this open for inheritance? If so, what scenarios would fit inheriting from ReflectionReference? * what happens when ReflectionReference::fromArrayElement() is given invalid data, such as non-existing keys? I'd expect it to throw. * instead of $ref1->getId() === $ref2->getId(), $ref1->matches($ref2) or such. * what are possible scenarios for getting the identifier as a primitive, and then storing it somewhere (like an array of reference identifiers)? * There seems to be a lot of design around ReflectionReference#getId() to avoid leaking internal pointer information: can it be completely dropped, if we have $ref1->matches($ref2) instead? Marco Pivetta http://twitter.com/Ocramius http://ocramius.github.com/ On Tue, Jan 15, 2019 at 11:16 AM Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi internals, > > I'd like to propose the addition of a ReflectionReference class, as > described in the following RFC: > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/reference_reflection > > This topic was previously discussed at > https://externals.io/message/102638 > . > The TL;DR is that some libraries need a way to detect references and > determine whether two references are the same. They previously used an ugly > hack to achieve this, but this hack will no longer (reliably) work due to > the introduction of typed properties, so we need to do something about this > for the 7.4 release. > > Regards, > Nikita >