On Fri, Nov 21, 2025 at 10:45 AM Edmond Dantes <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I have a mental habit: when I write asynchronous code, I always assume > that any object shared between coroutines can change at any moment. > Similarly, if you hand off memory ownership to another class or share > memory, you have to keep in mind that there is a chance some developer > might accidentally do something wrong. > > The only difference between synchronous and asynchronous code is that > you don’t have a precise moment in time when the change happens. And > yes, that makes debugging harder. It makes finding bugs harder. But > it’s not something fundamentally new. > I don't know how else to describe it, but I decided to give a last attempt here since you mentioned your mental habit: having a mental habit about async code makes perfect sense. What I'm trying to say is that most PHP developers don't have that mental habit and that's not a problem because Async code in PHP doesn't come into your project out of nowhere. With `spawn()` being native, anytime you do "composer update" your project may start running async code without your consent and without warning you that you should go through a mental habit that you don't even know exist because you never had to worry about async code before in your life. Having spawn() be an extremely easy way to start running async code is a great feature (not a bug). But the very first thing that seems to be missing is: I'm a dumb PHP developer that don't know and don't care about async php and when I upgrade to PHP X.Y, how do I keep my project always-sync without risking one of my composer packages suddenly calling spawn() and causing bugs I have no idea how to even begin to understand? ini settings are very frowned upon, but for the sake of a conversation, we can think of it like that. if I do async.enabled = 0, then nothing changes for me. Having this opt-in/opt-out control would mean that a broken website caused by spawn() only happens if they decide to enable async and they can start learning and developing their mental habit about how to work with async code. -- Marco Deleu
