PHP RFC: Property hook improvements

• Version: 0.9
• Date: 2024-06-28
• Author: Ilija Tovilo (tovilo.ilija@gmail.com), Larry Garfield (larry@garfieldtech.com)
• Status: Implemented
• First Published at: http://wiki.php.net/rfc/hook_improvements

While finalizing the implementation of the property hooks RFC patch, we have found a small area for improvement. This is nominally changes from the behavior defined in the original RFC, and thus we want to refer them through the RFC process.

There is one improvement we propose.

As defined in the original RFC, the following code would have been detected and throw a dedicated error.

class C
{
    public string $val = 'a' {
        get {
          return $this->val . $this->suffix();
        }
    }
 
    public function suffix(): string
    {
        return $this->val;
    }
}
 
$c = new C();
print $c->val;

While looking for optimizations, Ilija found he was able to refactor the hook logic to make it more than twice as fast: While there is still some overhead to a hook compared to a traditional get method, it's been reduced from “close to the cost of __get” to “almost negligible compared to a method.” Enough that it would almost certainly be swamped by the cost of the hook body itself. This is a massive improvement.

A side effect of that optimization, however, is that we cannot proactively detect the bug above. Instead, it would result in an infinite loop, which would eventually trigger a stack limit exception from PHP. (That logic already exists.)

We consider the slightly worse error handling fully justified by the performance improvement, and by the fact that the code above is a bug no matter what (it's just a question of when the bug gets reported). But as it is a change from the behavior stated in the previous RFC, we are putting it out for consideration.

None.

PHP 8.4.

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