> On 23 Nov 2023, at 17:21, Rowan Tommins <rowan.coll...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Thu, 23 Nov 2023 at 06:00, Stephen Reay <php-li...@koalephant.com> wrote: > >> I'm disappointed to see yet again that there's this implied notion that >> working with PHP in 2023 means "well surely you must be using composer", >> which leads to "but composer..." somehow being an accepted argument when >> it comes to missing/incomplete builtin functionality. >> > > > While I appreciate your point in the general case, in this particular > thread, the mentions of Composer are really just examples, or can be > reworded that way: > > Functions lack autoloading, but in practice this isn't a big problem > because you can just require_once a file defining them, and as long as > OpCache is running there's very little performance penalty. If you're using > a package manager or module loading system to integrate multiple > autoloaders, it's generally easy to add one or more required files as part > of the package / module config - *for example* Composer has a "files" array > in each package's "autoload" config. > > So the actual assumption is "surely you must be using OpCache", which > unlike Composer is bundled with PHP. > > Regards, > -- > Rowan Tommins > [IMSoP]
(Resending from list-address) Hi Rowan, Respectively, I disagree that it's "not a big problem" if your goal is to encourage people to use regular functions over classes with static methods. "No autoloading" is clearly a well known barrier to the use of userland functions, and "rewriting 'use composer' to 'use require_once'" isn't a comparable workaround, as evidenced by: - https://wiki.php.net/rfc/core-autoloading (from April 2023) paragraph 2 says: > The need for such a feature seems very clear as users will create “helper” > classes with static methods to take advantage of autoloading via the class > autoloading mechanism. An email earlier in this thread makes the same point (shiny gold sticker if you remember who wrote this): > The only issue being that we don't have good autoloading support for such > functions, and that's a whole different problem... > you can just require_once a file defining them, To paraphrase a certain secret agent: Do you want people writing faux-namespace classes? Because this is how you get people writing faux-namespace classes. > So the actual assumption is No, the assumption was very clearly written: > Autoloading is frankly mostly solved by using the `files` block in your > composer.json's autoload config, and then you don't need to care. Saying "a package loader" instead of "composer" isn't any better really. Autoloading of classes in PHP doesn't require a "package loader" to work. PHP ships with a built in class autoloader function, and pretending that using 'require_once' everywhere a function is used, is just as easy for the developer seem disingenuous to be honest. Cheers Stephen
