Re: Automatically execute Closures returned from primary script

Hi On 2026-09-22 15:17, Tim Düsterhus wrote:

My current PR automatically executes any Closure returned by the main PHP script, such that:

Based on the replies it has become clear that the proposed Closure approach has several questions to solve and possibly needs prior design (e.g. defining a request or context object that would be passed as a parameter) to not paint ourselves into a corner. This requires much more thought than I'm willing to spend right now, given I wanted to solve a specific use case of mine. I'm therefore abandoning the Closure idea and will instead look into …

Another possible solution, that I didn't yet evaluate, might be defining a magic constant __MAIN__ that is equivalent to __FILE__ of the script that is executed first.

… defining a __MAIN__ constant, which should hopefully have much fewer design considerations and might also benefit PHP applications that don't leverage the front-controller approach to protect internal files from direct access (e.g. as a native variant of phpBB’s IN_PHPBB constant). Best regards Tim Düsterhus