Re: Pre-RFC discussion about adding friendship to PHP

On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 12:50 PM Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 29, 2026, at 12:30 PM, Daniel Scherzer wrote: > > Hi internals, > > > > I'd like to add support for friendship in PHP. > > > > -Daniel > > There was a lot of related discussion around module/package/file > visibility not too long ago that is also worth reviewing. Currently I am > highly skeptical of friend classes, as I believe module-level visibility is > more useful than class-level, in general. > I think that perfect should not be the enemy of good, and this also lays the groundwork for namespace-level friends in the future. We shouldn't wait for a potential future "module-level visibility" if we can have friends now.. > > That said, were we to go this route, I agree that keywords would be the > way to go for the reasons given in the blog post. Also, there's some > plumbing already i place via aviz, at least for properties. In concept, > the following should be possible: > > class User { > friend UserFactory; > > public friend(set) string $name; > } > I think having friends that can access everything is more helpful than a new level of visibility - if you declare a class as a friend you already know that the class exists and wants to access private implementation details, so you can trust it to upload the class invariants. -Daniel