Hi Larry, On Tue, Aug 20, 2024 at 3:32 AM Larry Garfield <la...@garfieldtech.com> wrote: > > In fact, generic traits (essentially statically replacing the generic > > arguments at link-time) would be an useful feature which would remain > > useful even if we had fully reified generics. > > I recognize that some functionality will need support of internal > > zend_object_handlers. But that's not a blocker, we might provide some > > default internal traits with PHP, enabling the internal class handlers. > > So to summarize, I would not continue on that path, but really invest > > into monomorphizable generic traits instead. > > Interesting. I have no idea why Arnaud has mainly been investigating reified > generics rather than monomorphized, but a monomorphized trait has potential, > I suppose. That naturally leads to the question of whether monomorphized > interfaces would be possible, and I have no idea there. (I still hold out > hope that Levi will take another swing at interface-default-methods.) > > Though this still wouldn't be a path to full generics, as you couldn't > declare the inner type of an object at creation time, only code time. Still, > it sounds like an area worth considering.
Monomorphization as a solution to generic classes has a memory usage issue (it requires duplicating the class entry, methods, props, and also opcodes if method bodies can reference type parameters), and does not solve all the complexity: https://github.com/PHPGenerics/php-generics-rfc/issues/44. This would be less a problem for traits, as there is already some amount of duplication. Best Regards, Arnaud
