On Sat, 8 Nov 2025 at 17:18 Rob Landers <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Sidenote: > When I proposed nested classes earlier this year, the conversation quickly > shifted into what "packages" or "modules" should mean for PHP, and that > ended up becoming a much larger debate. I’d like to avoid pulling that > discussion into this RFC. It’s a related, but orthogonal topic and could > absolutely be explored in a *separate thread.* > > — Rob >
I understand the sentiment. I’ve participated in some of these debates. It seems like reaching consensus is impossible because it’s not possible for a solution to be perfect and there’s no consensus in choosing the least worst option. Unfortunately, namespace visibility, nested classes, class friendship and even some long debated performance optimizations which may or may not allow linking symbols and may or may not help Generics all sit around on finding a way to go from namespaces to packages. This alternative, to me, seems more likely to make things worse rather than better and I really hope PHP can figure out a package system.
