Re: [RFC] Context Managers

On Tue, Nov 4, 2025, at 2:13 PM, Larry Garfield wrote: > Arnaud and I would like to present another RFC for consideration: > Context Managers. > > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/context-managers > > You'll probably note that is very similar to the recent proposal from > Tim and Seifeddine. Both proposals grew out of casual discussion > several months ago; I don't believe either team was aware that the > other was also actively working on such a proposal, so we now have two. > C'est la vie. :-) > > Naturally, Arnaud and I feel that our approach is the better one. In > particular, as Arnaud noted in an earlier reply, __destruct() is > unreliable if timing matters. It also does not allow differentiating > between a success or failure exit condition, which for many use cases > is absolutely mandatory (as shown in the examples in the context > manager RFC). > > The Context Manager proposal is a near direct port of Python's > approach, which is generally very well thought-out. However, there are > a few open questions as listed in the RFC that we are seeking feedback > on. > > Discuss. :-) More updates to Context Managers: * We have added "masking" for the context variable, using essentially the same technique as the block scope RFC. * We have added support for try using, as a shorthand for when you want to wrap a try-catch-finally around a using statement anyway. More details of both are in the RFC. As no one seems to have a strong opinion on continue, we will most likely proceed with the current approach of matching switch behavior. There doesn't seem to be much interest in making using an expression, which I find unfortunate, but that means we'll probably drop that. Fortunately it is probably possible to change in the future if the need arises (the way throw was changed). --Larry Garfield