Hi Gina Le jeu. 26 juin 2025 à 14:07, Gina P. Banyard <intern...@gpb.moe> a écrit :
> On Monday, 2 June 2025 at 17:11, Gina P. Banyard <intern...@gpb.moe> > wrote: > > > Hello internals, > > > > This is the first RFC out of a set of type system related RFCs I want to > propose for PHP 8.5. > > It also used the recently enabled Markdown support on the wiki, so there > might be a few oddities. > > > > The RFC proposes to deprecate implicit type coercions to and from the > bool type for other scalar types. > > This a "weak" mode change only, as when strict_types are enabled none of > these coercions can happen. > > > > Let me know what you think about it. > > > > RFC: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate-function-bool-type-juggling > > I have updated the RFC to version 0.2 that expands on it and addresses > some of the counterarguments which were said during the discussion. > RFC: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate-function-bool-type-juggling > > If there is no-follow up feedback, I will open the vote for it sometime > next week. > > Thanks for experimenting with this on https://github.com/symfony/symfony/pull/60890/files It's good to see that fitting this RFC requires a relatively small number of lines to change even on a codebase like Symfony. We're not at 100% but still nice. Yet, it IS a big bang in terms of deprecations to fix that this will trigger. Their number is super high, because these boolean conversions happen on hotpath / in loops. This reminds me of the mandatory "?" for arguments with null defaults: the change made sense from a language design PoV, but the impact was, and still is very high. It was and still is a very costly deprecation for the community, and it's not over yet. That made me say at conferences that this was maybe not a good idea... Looking at the diff above, I think I can draw two sets of changes: 1. the ones that patch a cast-to-bool 2. the ones that patch a cast-from-bool The latter, cast-from-bool, I think they're all useful improvements. While most likely harmless in all the specific cases of the PR, doing e.g. an strpos() on false feels hardly legit. I'm therefore sympathetic to making these changes. For cast-to-bool, I'm WAY less convinced. From the PR above, explicit casts like "return (bool) preg_match(...)" on a method that returns a "bool" or "( bool) ($this->loggedErrors & $type)" are a clear downgrade: it makes the typing PHP just more verbose without any real benefit. That doesn't look worth asking the whole ecosystem to fix those deprecations. It is especially hard to see this as an improvement when comparing to using the same expressions with e.g. the "if ()" operator, which doesn't need the explicit cast (and shouldn't of course). In the RFC, you write that its motivation is to allow making the bool type equivalent to the true|false union. To do so you propose to make the bool type always behave like in "strict" mode. Personally, I'm moot about the motivation. I understand it, but it looks inappropriate to push deprecations from this somewhat (IMHO) theoretical angle. The added friction would need way stronger arguments to be justified IMHO. Would it be possible to trigger the deprecation only in the cast-from-bool direction, and accept casts-to-bool as seamlessly as there are now? If yes, then would it also be possible to make the true and false types have the same behavior (aka non-strict in casts-to-bool direction - when not in strict mode of course)? If yes to both questions, then that'd look like a better outcome that'd still allow fulfilling your goal, while providing maximum value to the community. As is, the cost/benefit ratio doesn't make this RFC look worth it to me. Last but not least, I'm not sure it's a good idea to rush this into 8.5. This is a high-impact change. We should give some time to the discussion, understand the impact and explore variants. Merging this in 8.6 would also give a few more months for open-source projects to adapt to the change (since many do run their CI with the master branch of PHP to spot changes as early as possible.) Cheers, Nicolas PS: I'm going AFK for the next ~7 days.
