> On 13. Jul 2025, at 20:38, Marc Bennewitz <marc@mabe.berlin> wrote: > Hi Nick, Claude, Hey Marc, > I think it's important to explicitly mark it as "this value will be stored in > memory", I mean just silently caching the get hook could quickly lead to > unexpected behavior. Like one would expect the value to be changed > The most here made the argument that "a changing value from a readonly get hook" would be the unexpected behaviour. That’s why we ended up with the current “alternative implementation 2”. Please see my last answer to Rob for a fair example [1] .
The current preferred alternative implementation covers both situations... If a property is `readonly`: - you can set once - on read you always get the same (once computed) value back If a property is NOT `readonly`: - you can set often - on read you always get the fresh (often computed) value back I argue that this is a very easy mental model. I hope that voters agree on “cached may be implied by readonly”, as Claude called it. > and another one wonders why a big chunk of memory will not be freed `get => > $this->readBigFile();`. > Where do you see non-freed memory in one but not the other? - in both scenarios, readonly or not, the `readBigFile()` will end up in memory. - on each consecutive property call the usage in both scenarios is the same. - when assigning a call the same property to multiple tmp vars the cached, once-computed version uses less memory than the non-cached version Do I miss something? Did I misunderstand something? Additionally, the cached version has the benefit that the expensive computation only happens once. > On the one hand I like the cached modifier but personally I would prefer a > separate init hook because it seems to be more clear that this is a backed > property that will be initialized once. > To have an `init` hook doesn’t solve the get hook issue. > The cached modifier I would expect to be an attribute applicable to any > function which uses another cache store similar to how it's possible in > python to memorize function calls which would be a very different feature. > As earlier answered to Claude [2], I seek to write less code. To introduce a `cached` modifier voids this for no strong reason (please see “mental model” above). -- Cheers, Nick [1] https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/128010 [2] https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/128007
