On 6/17/25 9:54 PM, Braunson Yager wrote:
I'd like to gauge interest in adding two debugging functions to PHP core: dd()
and dump().
Going out of your way to deliberately conflict with two very popular
userland function names is a bad idea.
*Enhanced Features Over Existing Solutions
*- Native performance (no userland overhead)
- Stack trace integration
- Memory usage reporting
- Execution timing (potentially)
- Better CLI formatting
All of these except the native performance already exist in userland
dumpers, and if you're counting xdebug's var_dump implementation then
you can scratch off native performance too.
*Why Core vs Userland?
*Similar to how var_dump() provides basic introspection, these functions
would offer enhanced debugging capabilities that benefit the entire
ecosystem, not just framework users.
The primary feature of these dumpers isn't "Enhanced debugging
capabilities" it's pretty printing in HTML output. Color highlighting
and unfolding are nice bonuses but they aren't present in other
languages by default either (eg. Rust's Debug trait)
Xdebug var-dumper and kint are all framework agnostic (And neither
xdebug nor kint even require composer) so I don't understand how the
existing solutions "just" benefit framework users.
If anything I'd say core PHP already has too many dump functions:
print_r and var_dump do essentially the same thing, with minor
variations in debug_zval_dump and var_export
- Jonathan
