Re: Convert ext/xml to use an object instead of resource

On 12.02.2019 at 16:00, Nikita Popov wrote: > The ext/xml extension currently has GC issues, see > https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=76874. The tl;dr is that uses > of xml_parser > will usually result in a cyclic structure, but resources do not support > cycle GC. This means that the user is required to take care of breaking GC > cycles manually, which is very unusual for PHP. > > I would like to port the xml extension from using a resources towards using > an object, which is fully GC integrated. This is implemented in > https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/3526. > > An XmlParser class is used instead of a resource. The class is final and > cannot be manually constructed. It is still used with the normal > xml_parser_* APIs. This is intended as an internal representation change, > not a conversion to OO APIs. The xml_parser_free() method becomes > effectively a no-op and may be deprecated in some future version. > > This change is intended for PHP 7.4. While it is technically BC breaking > (in that code that goes out of the way to use is_resource or similar may > break), but we've done a couple of these resource->object migration in > minor versions in the past (ref > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/operator_overloading_gmp and > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/hash-context.as-resource). > > Any thoughts? I'm all for switching to objects in 7.4. I'm a bit concerned regarding the name of the new XmlParser class, though, since the xml_set_object() (a terrible API, by the way) example[1] uses exactly this class name, and there may be quite some code which followed suit. Maybe we should call the class XMLPushParser, although that would be inconsistent with functions like xml_parser_create(). [1] <http://php.net/manual/en/function.xml-set-object.php#refsect1-function.xml-set-object-examples> -- Christoph M. Becker