Re: [RFC] Deprecate dynamic properties

Hi Nikita, hi everybody, Le mer. 25 août 2021 à 12:03, Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com> a écrit : > Hi internals, > > I'd like to propose the deprecation of "dynamic properties", that is > properties that have not been declared in the class (stdClass and > __get/__set excluded, of course): > > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate_dynamic_properties > > This has been discussed in various forms in the past, e.g. in > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/locked-classes as a class modifier and > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/namespace_scoped_declares / > > j.é;ÓonÐœ > ù4RBhttps://github.com/nikic/php-rfcs/blob/language-evolution/rfcs/0000-language-evolution.md > as a declare directive. > > This RFC takes the more direct route of deprecating this functionality > entirely. I expect that this will have relatively little impact on modern > code (e.g. in Symfony I could fix the vast majority of deprecation warnings > with a three-line diff), but may have a big impact on legacy code that > doesn't declare properties at all. > Thanks for the RFC, it makes sense to me and I support the move. Since Symfony is mentioned in the RFC, I thought you might want to know about this PR, that removes dynamic properties from the Symfony codebase: https://github.com/symfony/symfony/pull/44037/files What Nikita describes in the RFC is correct: declaring+unsetting the "groups" property works. There's just one more thing I had to do; I also had to replace two calls to property_exists: - if (!property_exists($this, 'groups')) { + if (!isset(((array) $this)['groups'])) { The rest are test cases where we've been lazily accepting fixtures with undeclared properties. No big deal, and I'm happy the engine might soon help us get a bit stricter in this regard. I read that some think that this PR is not required because static analysers (SA) can report when a dynamic property is used. Although that's correct, I think it would be detrimental to PHP as a language if SA tools (or any tools actually) were a requirement to code in the safe-n-modern way. You should not have to install any complex safeguarding tooling infrastructure to start coding; both for newcomers, but also for no-so-new-comers. About the discussion related to deprecations. I've yet to see a better reporting system than the current one. It's true that too many userland error handlers are throwing instead of collecting/logging/skipping deprecations. But these can be fixed (and many are being fixed these days, which is nice!) Cheers, Nicolas