In the slice of the "community" where I spend most of my time, medium-to-large companies using PHP with their own custom code on hundreds to thousands or even 10's of thousands of servers, neither annotations nor getter/setter are anywhere on their wishlist radar. What they most desire is performance, robustness and security. They would love to see a PHP release that had no syntax changes, no BC changes, but was twice as fast and crashed half as much. I realize this is just one (small?) slice of the community but so is the part of the community wanting annotations. This is the balancing act we have to perform. It is not stubbornness, nor living in the past, it is recognizing that each and every major feature addition has a destabilizing effect on the codebase and if the addition only serves a small slice of the userbase we have to think long and hard about the merits of it.
Personally I would love to see more RFCs focusing on performance and less on syntax changes. Of course, a syntax change RFC, and even the initial (often shaky) implementation of a syntax-related change is much much easier to whip up than the deep analysis, profiling and creativity required to find and come up with ways to make a complex piece of code faster or use less memory. -Rasmus -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
