Re: New handler for retrieving properties when object is serialized

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 2:59 PM, Johannes Schlüter <johannes@schlueters.de>wrote: > > Such a way for overloading is bad. This is painful on each update. If > there are different things to do use different hooks. The > implementations might call the same implementation but a "purpose" > option leads to a long term maintenance hell whenever there is a > change.(a tiny bit better would be using an enum instead of int as in > some situations compilers/analyzers might give a hint ... but still a > mess) > > Ok so probably better not to do that :) > But I still don't buy the argument for this hook. > > Typically internal classes use some C data structure for keeping their > internal state. Often actually in a form that it can not be represented > in zval. From that observation (after a few years of looking at phpsrc, > pecl external and close-source exts) Serializable is the preferred way > to serialize these in an efficient way (converting everything in zvals, > then serialize, finally freeing temporary data is a quite expensive > way ..) > I agree that Serializable is better for performance. The reason why I proposed this is to differentiate serialization properties from normal properties in cases where Serializable would require lots of coding for a small benefit (object is not serialized often) or it is not an options (DateTime - see bellow). > > So the purpose is to have a different serialized representation, so > there would be compatibility issues, similar to going to Serializable. > > Yeah but that serialized representation is exactly the same as the current representation (the serialized strings before the patch is exactly the same as the string after the patch :)). The difference is that get_properties returns empty HashTable now. The serialization is backward compatible though. I just want to find a solution for this problem. What would you do? Would you use Serialazable even if it breaks apps after updating PHP. Or would you still use get_properties (possibly with testing serialize_lock) ? Jakub