Re: The case for transpiled generics

Hi Brent > Today I'd like to hear your thoughts on what might be a controversial topic, though I > think it's worth having this discussion. I want to make the case for adding generic syntax, > without actually enforing any additional type checks at runtime. Please hear me out. I think having the option to omit runtime type checks could be valuable even for non-generic code. If your own internal classes all use static analysis the chance of passing a wrong type is pretty low. This would probably have to be on a per class or even per function basis as you can't reason about other people's code. I do think we need some form of generic runtime check. If we don't, how generics work is completely open to interpretation. Static analysis tools copy the behavior of PHP. If PHP has no behavior in this regard tools will deviate and generics won't have any real meaning at all. There are many nuances to generics (ask Matthew who wrote Psalm), we shouldn't underestimate that. With a hybrid approach we could also do full type checking in testing environments and disable it in more performance critical situations with more confidence. Ilija