> > I took this in a slightly different direction: > > http://pecl.php.net/classkit Any and all thoughts appreciated. > > Sara, seems very interesting to me. Anyway, can you please provide me > your shiva_destroy_class() extension? > Shiva's not anything approaching stable or trustable. It's just a five minute exercise I wrote for Sean Coates to illustrate some of the inherent dangers of futzing around with the class table.
If you need class redefinition, I would much sooner recommend classkit_import() which will aggregate all the methods from a new class definition over the top of an old class entry. (Note: It's been documented in CVS, it just hasn't shown in the manual build yet: http://cvs.php.net/co.php/phpdoc/en/reference/classkit/functions/classkit-import.xml ) I'll also note that while this extensions is more trustable than Shiva, it's *also* marked as beta. Sean (who uses this far more than I actually do) mentioned a bug (non-crashing, but it raises E_ERROR and halts your current script) when classkit_import() is used under certain conditions (something involving importing multiple classes in a single file, we're working through the specifics still). If you don't so-much want to redefine the class as undefine it, I suppose it could be done safely by following the idea in Zeev's earlier post which involves "hiding" the class rather than outright destroying it. That way if there are any instances hiding in some obscure symbol table somewhere (e.g. another instantiated object, a static variable hash or a local variable hash in an upstream function/method) they'll still have a class_entry to refer to. This is something I could add to classkit, but because the class definitions don't really disappear but are rather just "hidden", it'll appear to "leak" a little bit of memory each time it's used so again, I'd recommend classkit_import() over it. Before you ask: No, it's not "simple enough" to just go looking through those symbol tables to see if any instances exists. Possible yes, practical no. -Sara -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
