Re: [Vote] New in initializers

Hi NIkita, I've opened voting on https://wiki.php.net/rfc/new_in_initializers. Voting > will close on 2021-07-14. > > Note that relative to the original RFC, new support is limited to parameter > default values, attribute arguments, static variable initializers and > global constant initializers, and not supported in property initializers > and class constant initializers. The discussion thread > https://externals.io/message/113347 has some extensive > information on how > we got here. > I voted yes and I'm happy this will come to PHP. I realized I still have one concern that I want to share here, related to attributes: The RFC breaks the possibility to parse the arguments of an attribute in a generic and safe way. What I mean is that right now, attributes can be inspected while the corresponding classes are not installed, due eg to a missing optional dependency. This behavior is what makes attributes truly declarative: one can ignore what they don't care about. Extra semantics can be carried out by classes without making the related attributes a mandatory dependency. I think there is a way to preserve this behavior and that we should look for it. If I may propose one: we might add a new ReflectionAttribute::getUninitializedArguments() method, that would return the same as ReflectionAttribute::getArguments(), except that it would put a ReflectionAttribute (or similar) instance in place of objects in the data structure. As a corollary, we might also want to enforce that only child classes of the Attribute class can be nested inside another Attribute (at least if we want to reuse ReflectionAttribute as a placeholder.) WDYT? Nicolas