Hello everybody! I know that method overloading was discussed on past and because a lot of reasons it was declined [1]. I think that it should be considered maybe for PHP 8, but for now I would like to suggest a different implementation.
Because of a stronger support to parameter types that PHP has now, I think that is possible make this process more faster than before by handling it only in case of exceptions. I wil explain better. The biggest problem that I see about this topic is the loss of performance, but I think that it could be avoided by create a new keyword "overload" that should be applied before methods that could be overloaded. For instance: overload function sum(int $a, int $b): int; overload function sum(float $b, float $b): float; In this case, when call a method PHP could identify if it have a overloaded implementation, so ONLY in this case it will reduce performace to decided which implementation it should call. I don't know how PHP could treats it internally, but when overload keyword is identified, I think that it could generates a hash like "sum/int,int/int" and "sum/float,float/float" (method name, parameters types, return type). I don't know. So when method is called, it should convert the argument types and create a similar hash, making possible to identify what overloaded method should be run. It seems slow, but I think that the opcache could simplify the next operations to connect directly the call to the correct overloaded method. Please, tell what do you think, because I really wants method overload on PHP 8 or before. Currently we should do some code hacks to make it possible that certainly is slower than a native implementation. Thanks! [1] https://marc.info/?l=php-internals&m=121397217528280&w=2 -- David Rodrigues
