On Sun, Jun 28, 2026, at 7:17 PM, Rob Landers wrote:
> Hello internals,
>
> I'd like to put forward Primary Constructors
> <https://wiki.php.net/rfc/primary-constructors> for comment.
>
> An implementation PR will be opened later today (UTC), and the RFC
> updated with this discussion thread.
>
> — Rob
I support this feature, and am glad to see it. It will make struct-objects
that much easier to write, as well as more interesting value objects.
To the objections about readonly... Seriously, readonly is broken. :-) Use
private(set) instead and you get essentially the same effect, unless you're
doing something screwy inside your class. And if you are, then you already
know it.
As Rob already noted, there's a massive number of existing classes where it's
not even an issue: There's no hooks or need for them, and readonly works fine
then. Or switching them over to private(set) if adding a hook in the future is
not hard. (Unless there's inheritance involved, and then the problem is
inheritance. :-) )
We can't remove readonly from the language, but we should not allow its
limitations and flaws to keep us from making our lives easier.
The RFC has no mention of attributes. An example of that would be helpful,
even though I presume it's exactly what one would expect it to be.
The one addition I would ask for is to note that in Kotlin and Swift, there is
a post-primary-constructor initializer, called an `init` block. It has no
body, but lets you do post-property-assignment stuff. It's basically an
argument-free constructor. I think that would go a long way toward smoothing
the concerns people have about this feature being too "locked down."
If we don't want a new keyword for it, we could allow a __construct method that
has NO arguments if there is a primary constructor. It would get called last,
after everything else (including parent constructors if appropriate) has run.
(Whether it's spelled `__construct() { ]]` or `__construct { }`, I don't have
a strong opinion.) A __construct that does take arguments would still be a
compile-time conflict with a primary constructor.
--Larry Garfield
