Re: [Initial Feedback] PHP User Modules - An Adaptation of ES6 from JavaScript

On Thu, Jun 27, 2024, at 04:15, Michael Morris wrote: > Hello all. This is a ramble of an idea that's managed to run around my head for a few days > now. It isn't fully formed, but I've ran the thought experiment as far as I can on my own > and want to share it with all of you. > > I've mostly been a lurker and I've seen a lot of RFC's come and go. Of those not > accepted many have been passed over because of background compatibility. And then there is the issue > that PHP has multiple design flaws that seem impossible to get rid of. Finally, I sense from > conversations I've read that there are a lot of engine parser optimizations that haven't > been tried because of the background compatibility problems present. > > JavaScript was in this position as well 10 years ago when JavaScript modules were introduced > with the ES6 syntax. Only recently have these modules finally begun to become first class members of > node.js. The existing CommonJS require mechanism remains and will remain in Node for the > foreseeable future, but the ES6 syntax allows an opportunity to sidestep the issue. The most > significant of these is JavaScript modules run in strict mode, which actually removes features that > are problematic for the engine or make it difficult to create optimized code. > > Something similar could be done in PHP, and that's what the remainder of this letter is > about, but before I continue I want to make clear my vantage point: I am but a humble user of the > code, I'm no expert on the underpinnings of the Zend engine. In the text to follow I'm > going to make wrong calls on some things - maybe multiple things. I'm not married to anything > here. Further, even if I were a master of the engine and knew where to start, the scope of this is > too large for any one person to undertake. > > So all that said, I'll begin. > > PHP User Modules are php files that are brought into the runtime through a new parser that is > able to generate faster and more concise runtime code by removing support for problematic features > and imposing a strict mode by default. They focus on PHP as a language and not as a template engine. FYI, in non-strict mode, this produces a deprecation warning that can be caught and thrown from: (fn(int $x) => print($x))(123.456); // deprecation warning but this will work (fn(int $x) => print($x))(123.000); // this is fine Both of those are errors in strict types, so you might be tempted to do fn(int $x) => print($x))((int)$some_var); but $some_var might not actually be an integer-like (such as null or a string that becomes zero). Some of us prefer the more strict, non-strict mode as the built-in strict mode is actually ... uhh, problematic, to say the least, in some business cases. So forcing strict mode is probably a non-starter. > > The only background compatibility break is the introduction of three keywords: > "import", "export" and "from" > > The PHP interpreter does not load PHP files as modules unless it is directed to do so in an ini > file or an .htaccess file using the default_filetype directive. If this directive is missing its > value will be "default" - the value "module" will be used to trigger loading the > initial PHP file as a module, and further types could in theory be introduced at a far later date. > > Again, this setting only affects the INITIAL PHP script file loaded by the interpreter, such as > the index.php of Drupal. Files that are included with include, include_once, require, or > require_once will be imported as they always have. Files that are included with import are PHP User > Modules. One of the advantages of the current autoloading file-loading system is that files are not included until the are used. This allows you to run MASSIVE projects that realistically only need to load dozens of files. For example, I know of some code-bases that have literally millions of PHP files collected over the last 15 years and hundreds of developers working on them every day. > > User Module Files > PHP User Modules have the following properties (Proposed, and very much subject to change): > * They are code files. They have no <?php or ?> tags, and the inclusion of those tags is > a parse exception. I know this will be problematic for PHP storm and other IDE's, but it's > not an insurmountable problem. So, will ?> work? I have turned on output buffering and then just wrote out what I needed --- ie, a template, then get the output. > * If the removal of HEREDOC and NOWDOC syntax would simplify the parser, then these too would > be removed from User Modules. Are we sure we want *multiple* PHP parsers to maintain? — Rob