Hello internals, I've been having this mild annoyance with exit()/die() since I wrote a CLI script using a boolean $hasErrors variable to know if the script failed or not and to indicate if the script failed via a non-zero status code by doing: exit($hasErrors);
However, it turns this doesn't work, because exit() will cast everything that is not an integer to a string, something that I find surprising but also weird as it will not type error on resources or array but rather print the warning to the CLI. Anyway, yesterday I decided to put on my mad scientist lab coat and make this a reality, I have a W.I.P. PR here: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/13483 I hear you, but what about exit; ?! Do not worry exit; is still supported! It only requires a _tiny_ bit of dark magic to achieve this! exit; would just be interpreted as a fetch to a constant, so when attempting to access the undefined exit/die case-insensitive constant we just need to exit as if we were calling the function! Having exit and die be functions gives us access to some interesting functionality, such as defining exit() in a namespace, or removing it via the disable_functions INI setting (the latter allowing us to define a custom global exit() which could be useful for testing that a function actually calls exit). We can also pass it like any other callable and reflect on it with reflection. Finally, this removes the T_EXIT token and ZEND_EXIT opcode freeing one slot. The W.I.P. PR implement every possible restriction: - not being able to declare an exit()/die() function - not being able to disable them - not being able to define a constant named exit/die Maybe it would be wise to deprecate using exit as a statement to be able to get rid of the undefined constant magic handling. Anyhoot, before I spend more time on this and write a proper RFC, do people think this is a good idea or not? Best regards, Gina P. Banyard
