>
> Yes, I think we are rapidly approaching the limit where to make the
> language stricter, we need an official static analysis tool, like Hack has,
> rather than trying to do everything at run-time.
It might even be possible to build this into OpCache somehow, so that if
> you pre-analyse your code, it will skip runtime checks that it can prove
> will never fail (e.g. return type annotation on a function that always
> returns literals).
> The tricky part is that PHP is a highly dynamic language (...)
Features like scalar type hints, return types, property type hints, and
preloading (which makes the definition of a type-hinted class available at
compile time), should definitely help towards skipping a lot of runtime
checks!
On Fri, 5 Apr 2019 at 11:37, Rowan Collins <rowan.coll...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Apr 2019 at 09:57, Robert Hickman <robehick...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > >
> > > For instance:
> > >
> > > function foo(): type nothrow {
> > > throw new SomethingException;
> > > }
> >
> > Would it be possible to analyse the call graph at compile time
> > (bytecode generation) and then trigger a fatal error? It wouldn't be
> > possible for variable functions/methods though. A separate static
> > analyser could do the same thing.
> >
>
>
> Yes, I think we are rapidly approaching the limit where to make the
> language stricter, we need an official static analysis tool, like Hack has,
> rather than trying to do everything at run-time.
>
> It might even be possible to build this into OpCache somehow, so that if
> you pre-analyse your code, it will skip runtime checks that it can prove
> will never fail (e.g. return type annotation on a function that always
> returns literals).
>
> The tricky part is that PHP is a highly dynamic language, so there's a lot
> of cases where the analysis can only return "maybe". My understanding is
> that this is what a lot of the work on Hack is doing: creating a language
> which looks a lot like PHP, but doesn't have as many ambiguous cases which
> can't be analysed statically.
>
> Regards,
> --
> Rowan Collins
> [IMSoP]
>
