Hi internals, Something that came up in the arginfo thread: We can now add type annotations for everything, apart from return types on methods of non-final classes.
The reason is that adding these return types would require inheriting classes to specify them as well. The same problem does not exist for argument types thanks to https://wiki.php.net/rfc/parameter-no-type-variance (which is exactly why we wanted that RFC). For example, if we add a "string" return type to DateTimeZone::getName(), then any userland child of DateTimeZone would also have to specify a string return type. The good news: Userland classes can already specify those types *now*, because adding a return type in a child class is legal. This means that if we add those return types, userland extensions do not have to bump their minimum requirement to PHP 8 when adding the return type: They can still be compatible all the way down to PHP 7 (or 7.1, depending on the type). What do you think about this? As we are currently annotating everything with types, and we're at a major version, this would be the ideal time to make this change. But there's certainly a BC break here. (And, for the record, this is not the type of BC break where P++ or editions help, without creating a larger mess.) Regards, Nikita
