Hi, I'm Derick. Welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to explaining the latest developments in the PHP language. This is Episode 89. Today I'm talking with Larry Garfield and Joe Watkins about a partial function application RFC that they're proposing with Paul Crevela and Levi Morrison. Larry, would you please introduce yourself?

Hello World. I'm Larry Garfield or Crell on most social medias. I'm a staff engineer for Typo3 the CMS. And I've been getting more involved in internals these days, mostly as a general nudge and project manager.

And hello, Joe, would you please introduce yourself as well?

Hi, I'm Joe, or Krakjoe, I do various PHP stuff. That's all there is to say about that really.

I think you do quite a bit more than just a little bit. In any case, I think for this RFC, you, you wrote the implementation of it, whereas Larry, as he said, did some of the project management, I'm sure there's more to it than I've just paraphrased in a single sentence. But can one of you explain in one sentence, or if you must, maybe two or three, what partial function applications, or I hope for short, partials are?

Partial function application, in the broadest sense, is taking a function that has some number of parameters, and making a new function that pre fills some of those parameters. So if you have a function that takes four parameters, or four arguments, you can produce a new function that takes two arguments. And those other two you've already provided a value for in advance.

Okay, I feel we'll get into the details in a moment. But what are its main benefits of doing this? What would you use this for?

Oh, there's a couple of places that you can use partial application. It is what got me interested. It's very common in functional programming. But it's also really helpful when you want to, you have a function that like, let's say, string replace takes three arguments, two of which are instructions for what to replace, and one of which is the thing in which you want to replace. If you want to reuse that a bunch of times, you could build an object and pass in constructor values and save those and then call a function. Or you can just partially apply string replace with the things to search for, and the things to replace with and get back a function that takes one argument and will do that replacement on it. And you can then reuse that over and over again. There are a lot of cases like that, usually use in combination with functions that wants a callback. And that callback takes one argument. So array map or array filter are cases where very often you want to give it a function that takes one argument, you have a function that takes three arguments, you want to fill in those first ones first, and then pass the result that only takes one argument to array map or a filter, or whatever. So that's the one of the common use cases for it.

That's the benefits and some of its background comes from functional programming, as you've just mentioned. What is the syntax that you're proposing and some of the semantics?

The syntax that we've developed, are two placeholders that you can use in a function call. So if you're calling a function as you normally would, but for one of the arguments, you pass a question mark, or at the tail end, you have an ellipsis (dot dot dot), then that tells the engine: This is not a function call. This is a partial application. And what it will do is return not the result of the function but return a closure object that has the the arguments that correspond to those question marks. And then when called with those arguments, we'll pass those along with the original function. Probably easier to explain, if I use a concrete example, using the string replace example we talked about before, you would call it with str_replace, the example from the RFC, hello, hi, question mark. What that gives you is a callable, a closure that has one argument, which will take its type and name from str_replace. So the third argument to str_replace essentially gets copied into that closure. And what closure does internally when you call it with that one argument is it just calls string replace with hello, hi, and whatever argument you gave it and returns that value. It is conceptually very, very similar to just writing a short lambda or an arrow function that takes one arguments and calls string replace hello, hi, and that argument. In most cases, it ends up functioning almost exactly like that. There's a few subtle differences in a few places. But most of the time, you can think of it working essentially like that. The question mark means one required argument only. The dot dot dot means zero or more arguments, if you want to, say provide the first argument to a function, and then dot dot dot would mean: And then all of the other arguments, however many there are, even if it's that zero, those are what's left, which languages other languages that have partial application as a first class feature, usually end up doing it that way where you can only pre fill from the left. PHP, because the placeholder lets us do it in any order. So we can skip over arguments if we want to, which is quite nice. But it means that you can take a function and reduce it to, I want to prefill just these two arguments and leave these three arguments for the new function, or I want to prefill these arguments from the left, and then everything else, whatever it is, is left. It also lets you do cute things like if you provide all of the arguments to a function, and then just tack on a dot dot dot the end of it, then you get back a closure that takes essentially zero arguments. But when called, will call that other function. So it's lets lets you really easily build a delayed function as you need to.

When do the arguments to the function get evaluated then?

Arguments are evaluated in advance. So this is the subtle difference between partial application and the short lambda syntax. In a short lambda, what happens is, essentially, that entire expression on the right hand side gets wrapped up into a closure. And so any arguments that are compound like they have a function call that is inside one of the placeholders, or one of the arguments, that'll get evaluated later. With partial application, the function that is in a parameter position gets evaluated first and reduced to a value. And that value gets partially applied to the function. 90% of the time, that's not going to be an issue. There are a few cases where doing it one way or the other may be subtly different, but you'll spot those fairly easily.

So the RFC talks about things that you can do, but also a few things that you cannot do or don't want to do yet. What are these things that partials won't support, or run support yet, at least?

The main thing that it doesn't support is named placeholders. You can pre fill a value or an argument with a named named argument. But not a named placeholder. Those have to be positional. Named placeholders are complicated to implement, and run into a question of, if you provide those in a different order, does that also change the order of the arguments in the partially applied function that you get back in that closure? And there's a good argument to be made that either way is logical. And so we're like, no, does not deal with it, too complicated. We'll just positional only. And you cannot specify an optional arguments either. It's just again, too complicated. Things get too weird. If you have those advanced cases, use our short lambda, that works just fine. If you want to just make a new function that defers to a new function, and change its API in the process, short lambda works fine. And it's still quite short.

I know the RFC talks a little bit about references, but I don't like talking about references. So let's skip that part. In my opinion, they should be removed from the language. But I know we can't.

There's occasionally used for them. But very occasionally.

There's a bunch of technical things that I also want to chat about. And hopefully, Joe, if you want to fill in, I'd be more than welcome to hear your opinions on these things. But the first one is that PHP has this thing called func_get_args. How does that work with these partials? How does that tie in together?

It should mostly behave as if you've invoked the function directly. We don't want there to be a huge discrepancy between. The callee know whether they've been called through partial application or complete application. It should be the same.

That is good to know. I mean, I always like it how things work as people expect them to work, right?

Yeah.

We already have used the dot dot dot operator for variadics. But you're reusing the dot dot dot, or ellipses, as you more eloquently call it earlier. Here again, as well, is that not going to cause issues? Or does that tie in well together?

Well, there's quite a lot of debate about what's the right symbol to use. I think it's dot dot dot, and I think Larry agrees with me. But there's some people who want to stick an extra question mark on the end, which to me looks like it reads zero to one. And to Larry, it looks like an extra character that's just not needed. Other people say it makes sense for them. But if you can type three characters and not four, I mean, you need a really good argument. The arguments that have been put forward so far don't really make very much sense for me. Maybe we should ask that question and it doesn't really matter. In the end, what the syntax is, is if it's a difference between it getting in and not getting in, then we'll just put the extra question mark on there. I don't really have a really good argument to change it like to be like that.

To be honest, to me, it looks like you then have two placeholders.

Yeah.

I don't feel the need for it.

That's also another argument because we've introduced this one symbol, and then this other symbol, and then you put them together. And that's two things. I mean, you can't have one and one equals one.

Fair enough. The RFC does touch on another quite interesting thing, I think, which is constructors, which it also be able to partially apply. But of course, you've mentioned that, that arguments get applied immediately when you do the substitution, when you do the partial application. But of course, the constructor is a bit weird because a constructor runs immediately after an object has been constructed. So how does that work together with partials?

So at first, we made it so like if you invoke a constructor with reflection, and you just invoke it over and over again, it'll invoke it on the same object, you won't get back a new object. It's not the constructor that returns the object, it's the new operator. So first, we had a bit dumb. And we did just like what reflection does. And if you applied to a constructor, you'd get back a closure that just repeatedly invokes the constructor, which is, as Larry called it, quite naive. So we went back and revisited that. And so now it acts like a factory. Every time you invoke the closure return from an application, you get a brand new object, which is more in line with what people expect. And it's also quite cool. It's one of my favourite bits, actually as it turns out.

In my opinion, it also makes more sense than then having an apply to the same object over and over again. Whether I'd like it or not, I don't know yet.

Oh, the other option is traditional constructors to avoid the surprising behaviour. But that would be just a strange.

There are a lot of use cases where you want to take a bunch of values, convert them to objects using an array map, supporting constructors for that makes total sense to me.

And I would probably say, though, that I would prefer not allowing it over it applying over the same object over again. You've touched a little bit on some common cases where you want to use this, do you perhaps have some other ideas where this might be really useful?

So there's three use cases that we think are probably going to be the lion's share. One is to just use the dot dot dot operator. So you have some function or method call, call it with dot dot dot, and that's it. You prefill nothing, which gives you back a closure that is identical in signature to the function or the method that you're applying it to. Everything we've said about functions applies the methods here as well. Which means we now effectively have a new way to refer to a function or a method and make a callable out of it, that doesn't involve just sticking it into a string. You just say, hey, function called dot dot dot, or an arrow bar, parentheses, dot dot dot, parentheses. And now you can turn any function or method into a callable and pass that around. And it's still, it's not wrapped up into the silly array format, it's still accessible to static analysers and refactoring tools. Hopefully, with this, you will never need to refer to a function name using a string ever again, never refer to a method call as an array of object and method. So that that just is not needed any more in the vast majority of cases.

That alone is probably worth having them, maybe.

And Nikita had an RFC that was doing just that, and nothing else. It's kind of a junior version of this. I don't think that's necessary, the full full scope here works, and gives us that. The second use case that I think is going to be common are unary functions. That's functions that take a single argument. More to the point, as I mentioned before, a lot of functions take a callback. And that callback needs a single argument, array map, array filter, some validation routines, a lot of other things like that. So it's now stupidly easy to take any arbitrary function or method and turn it into a single parameter function, which you can then pass as a callback to array map, array filter, all these other tools, and it just becomes really easy to pre fill things that way. The third is the other one I mentioned earlier, if you pre fill all the arguments, and then just put a dot dot dot at the very end, which means zero or more, you now have a function that takes no arguments, but calls the original function you specified with all the arguments you specified. This often the case for default values, where I want to have a default value available, but don't want to take the time to compute it in advance because it might be expensive. Whatever function it is that will determine that default value, I just partially apply that and give it all the arguments and I get back a callable. That creating a callable is dirt cheap, but when I actually need that value, I can then call it at that time, but it won't actually get called unless I need it. That's another use case that we expect to be common. There are no doubt others that we haven't thought of, or that will be less common, but still useful. I think this will probably replace a large chunk of the use cases for short lambdas. Not because short lambdas are bad, they're wonderful. But so many of them convert a function to a simpler function. And this gives us an even more compact, more readable syntax for that, with even less extra symbols and flotsam around it.

I saw, hopefully as a joke, saying that, instead of using the question mark, we should use dollar sign dollar sign, and then we should call the token name T_BLING.

This RFC actually has a storied history. Several years ago, Sara Golemon had proposed porting the pipe operator from Hack to PHP. The pipe operator is an operator available in a lot of different languages that lets you string together a series of functions. So you pass a function, pass an argument into one function, its results you pass to the next function, its results, you pass the next function and so on, which is a good case for unary functions. In Hack's syntax, they don't use a function on the right hand side, they use an arbitrary expression, and then dollar dollar as a placeholder for where to put the value from the left hand side from the previous step. It's the only language that does that.

The other language that does it is bison.

Or Bison also does that style of?

It does something weird like that, yeah. Have a look at the grammar file.

I've looked in there. It's scary. So at the time, she didn't actually put an implementation in for it. But there was some discussion about it. I joked that if she wanted to do that, she should call it T_BLING. And she thought it was hilarious, but never went anywhere. A year ago, I started working on a pipe operator RFC that did just the pipe part, but used a callable on the right hand side, instead of an expression, more like F#, and Haskell, and other languages that have a pipe operator. And their main response to that was, we'd like this, this is cool, except that just using short lambdas on the right all the time to make unaries is too ugly. We want partial application first. So I spent a while trying to bribe someone with more experience and knowledge than me to work on partial application. I tried bribing Ilya Tovolo, to do so by working with him on enumerations. And we got enumerations in, but he doesn't have the time to work on partial application. Levi and Paul had already written an RFC for partial application that had no implementation. It's just a skunkworks, essentially. Then a few weeks ago, Joe pops up and starts working on an implementation for partials. And I, to this day, don't know what interested him in it. But I'm very happy about this fact. So as we updated the RFC, I knew that people want a bike shed about syntax. So I threw that in as a joke. I don't think we're actually going to do that. It's just a little inside reference that is now no longer inside.

Joe what made you work on partials, then?

It's interesting to write. I've had my fun whether it gets in or not.

Sometimes that's the case, right? So just working on this is all the fun.

Sometimes it's fun to just run down rabbit holes for the heck of it. And sometimes really cool things can come out of that sometimes.

At some point, I might have to implement support for partials like I have for closures in Xdebug as well. Because at some point, people might want to debug these things. So I'm a little bit interested in how do these the closures that it generates? Where does it store the already applied arguments?

So partials have the same binary struct up to this point or of the closure, and then after that there's some extra fields.

Would they still have the names?

No, because named arguments aren't actually named, that information is lost. By the time we've got them, we don't have any name information. We've only got their correct position, according to the call that was made.

And every argument that hasn't been filled and doesn't have a special placeholder in there, or does it keep track of which ones have been filled in?

We've got two special placeholders internally, you won't see as undef or null or anything.

Okay, that's good to know. What has the reaction been so far?

Slightly positive. There were a lot of discussions early on about do we support argument reordering? And should it use a single placeholder or two separate placeholders? Originally, we had one and realized after a while, that doesn't actually work. There're use cases where that will be confusing. Overall, the feedback has been quite positive, and I fully expect that to pass. Really the only question people are still debating about at this point is ellipsis versus ellipses question mark.

Yeah, I think the first version of the RFC was quite well received. Someone said we could document it as to make a partial sprinkle or question mark over it and hope for the best.

Oh, that's good to hear. With feature freeze coming not pretty soon now. When do you think you're putting this up for a vote?

Probably in the next couple of days. The only question I think is whether we include a second question for which variadic placeholder to use, which syntax/ Or if we just say it's dot dot dot, go away. Other than that it should go to a vote probably before this episode airs.

Thank you very much, both of you for taking the time to me today to talk about partials.

Thank you again Derick, hopefully see you once more on this season.

Thanks Derick, see you soon.

Welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to explaining the latest developments in the PHP language. This is Episode 88. Today I'm talking with George Peter Banyard about pure intersection types. George, could you please introduce yourself?

Hello, my name is George Peter Banyard. I work on PHP code development in my free time. And on the PHP Docs.

This RFC is about intersection types. What are intersection types?

I think the easiest way to explain intersection types is to use something which we already have, which are union types. So union types tells you I want X or Y, whereas intersection types tell you that I want X and Y to be true at the same time. The easiest example I can come up with is a traversable that you want to be countable as well. So traversable and countable. Currently, you can do intersection types in very hacky ways. So you can either create a new interface which extends both traversable and countable, but then all the classes that you want to be using this fashion, you need to make them implement the interface, which might not be possible if you using a library or other things like that. The other very hacky way of doing it is using reference and typed properties. You assign two typed properties by reference, one being traversable, one being countable, and then your actual property, you type alias reference it, with both of these properties. And then my PHP will check: does the property respect type A those reference? If yes, move to the next one. It doesn't respect type B, which basically gives you intersection types.

Yeah, I saw that in the RFC. And I was wondering like, well, people actually do that?

The only reason I know that is because of Nikita's slide.

The thing is, if it is possible, people will do it, right. And that's how that works.

Yeah, most of the times.

The RFC isn't actually called intersection types. It's called pure intersection types. What does the word pure do here?

So the word pure here is not very semantic. But it's more that you cannot mix union types and intersection types together. The reasons for it are mostly technical. One reason is how do you mix and match intersection types and union types? One way is to have like union types take precedence over intersection types, but some people don't like that and want to explicit it grouping all the time. So you need to do parentheses, A intersection B, close parentheses, pipe for the union, and then the other type. But I think the main reason is mostly the variance, like the variance checks for inheritance are already kind of complicated and kind of mind boggling.

I'm sure we'll get into the variance rules in a moment. What is it actually what you're proposing to add here. What is the syntax, for example?

So the syntax is any class type with an ampersand, and any other class type gives you an intersection type, which is the usual way of doing and.

When you say class types, do you also mean interfaces?

Yes, PHP has a concept of class types, which are mostly any class in any interface. There's also a weird exception where parent and self are considered class types, but those are not allowed.

Okay, so it's just the classes that you've defined and the class that are part of the language but not a special keywords, self and parent and static, I suppose?

Yes, the reason for that is standard types are not allowed to be part of an intersection, because nothing can be an integer and a string at the same time. Now, there are some of the built in types, which can be kind of true. You could have a callable, which is a string, because callables can be arrays, or can be a closure. But that's like very weird and not very great. The other one is iterable. If when you expand that out, you get redundant types, which we can talk about later. And the final thing is parent, self, and static, just makes for some very weird design questions, in my opinion, like, if you ask for something to be an intersection with itself, you basically can only enforce conditions on subclasses. You have a class and you say: Oh, I want it to return self, but also be countable for some reason, but I'm not countable. So if you extend me, then you need to be countable, but I'm not. So it's very weird. parent has kind of the very same weird semantics where you can ask a parent, but it's like, if the base class doesn't support it, and you ask for a parent to be an intersection, then you basically need the child to implement the interface and then a child to return the first child. If you do that main question. Why? Because I don't see any good reasons to do it. And it just makes everything harder.

You've only added for the sake of completeness instead of it being useful. Let's move on birds. You've mentioned which types are supported, which is class names and interface names. You already hinted a little bit at redundant types. What are redundant types?

Currently, PHP already does that with union types. If you repeat the type twice in a union, you'll get a compile error. This only affects compiled time known aliases. If you use a use statement, then PHP knows that you basically using the same type. However you use a runtime alias, then it can't detect that.

A runtime alias, what's that?

So if you use the function class_alias.

It's new to me!

it technically exists. It also doesn't guarantee basically that the type is minimal, because it can only see those was in its own file. For example, if you say I want A and B, but B is a child class of A, then the intersection basically resolves to only B. But you can only know that at runtime if classes are defined in different files. So the type isn't minimal. But if you do redundant types, basically, it's a easy way to check if you might be typing a bug.

You try to do your best to warn people about that. But you never know for certain.

You never know for certain because PHP doesn't compile everything into like one big program like in check. Static analyser can help for that.

Let's talk a little bit about technical aspects, because I recommend that implementing intersection types are quite different from implementing union types. What kind of hacks that you have to make in a parser and compiler for this?

Our parser has being very weird. The parsing syntax should be the same as union types. So I just copy pasted what Nikita did. I tried it. It worked for return types without an issue. It didn't work with argument types, because bison, which is the tool which generates our parser, was giving a shift reduce conflict, which basically tells: Oh, I got two possible states I can go in, and I don't know which branch I need to go, because the PHP parser only does one look ahead. Because it was conflicting, the ampersand, either for the intersection type or for to mark a reference. Normally, if the paster is more developed, or does more look ahead, it is not a conflict. And it shouldn't be. Ilia managed to came up with this ingenious idea, which is just redefine the ampersand token twice and have very complicated names, and just use them in different contexts. And bison just: now I have no issue. It is the same token, it is the same character. Now that you have two different tokens it manages to disambiguate, like it's shift produce. So that's a very weird.

I'll have a look at what that actually does, because I'm curious now myself. Beyond the parser, I think the biggest and most complicated part of this is implementing the variance rules for these intersection types. Can you give a short summary of what a variance rules are, and potentially how you've actually implemented them?

Since PHP seven point four, return types and up covariant, and parameter types are contravariant. Covariant means you can like restrict, we can be more specific. And contravariance means you can be broader or like more generic. Union types already gives some interesting covariance implications. Usually, you would think, well, a union is always broader than a single type, you say: Oh, I want either a traversable or accountable, it seems that you're expanding the type sphere. However, a single type can have as a subtype, a union type. For example, you say,:Oh, my base type is a Class A, and I have two child classes, which are B and C. I can type covariantly that I want either B or C, because B or C is more specific than just A. That's what union types over there allows you to do. And the way how it's implemented. And how to check for that is you traverse the list of child types, and check that the child type is an instance of at least one of the parents types. An intersection by virtue of you adding constraints on the type itself will always be more specific than just a single type. If you say: Oh, I want a class A, then more specifically, so I want something of class A and I want it to be countable. So you're already restrict this, which gives some very interesting implications, meaning that a child type can have more types attached to itself than a parent type. That's mostly due how PHP implements its type system, to make the distinctions, basically, I've added the flag, which is either this is a union, meaning that you need to check it is part of one, or it's an intersection. The thing with intersection types is that you need to reverse the order in how you check the types. So you basically need to check that the parent is at least an instance of one of the child types, but not that none of the child types is a super type of the parent type. Let's say you have class C, which extends Class B and Class B extends Class A. If I say let's say my base type is B to any function, and I give something which is a intersection T, any interface, this would not be a valid subtyping relation to underneath B. Because if you looked it was a Venn diagram in some sense, you've got A which is this massive sphere, you've got B which is inside it, and C which is inside it. A intersection something intersects the whole of A with something else, which might also intersect with B in a subset, but it is wider than just B, which means like the whole variance is very complicated in how you check it because you can't really reuse the same loop.

I can't imagine how much more complicated this gets when you have both intersection and union types in the same return type or parameter argument type.

One of the primary reasons why it's currently not in the RFC, because it is already mind boggling. And although I think it shouldn't be that hard to like, add support for it down the line, because I've already split it mostly up so it should be easy to check: Oh, is this an intersection? Is this a union? And then you need to branch.

Luckily because standard types aren't included here, you also don't really have to think about coercive mode and strict mode for these types. Because that's simply not a thing.

That's very convenient.

Is the future scope to this RFC?

The obvious future scope is what I call composite types, is you have unions and intersections available in the same type. The main issue is mostly variance, because it's already complicated, adding more scope to it, it's going to make the variance go even harder. I think with most programming languages, the variance code is always complicated to read. While I was researching some of it, I managed to hit a couple of failures, which where with I think was Julia and the research paper I was it was just like focusing on a specific subset. And like, basically proving that it is correct. It's not a very big field. Professors at Imperial, which I've talked to, have been kind of helpful with giving some pointers. They mostly work with basically proper languages or compiled languages, which have this whole other set of implications. Apparently, they have like a bunch of issues about how you normalize the types like in an economical form, to make it easier to check. Which is probably one of the problems that will need to be addressed, when you get like such a intersection and union type. First, you normalize it to some canonical form, and then you work with it. But then the second issue is like how do you want the composite types to actually be? Is it oh, you have got parentheses when you want to mix and match? Or can you use like union precedence? I've heard both opinions. Basically, some people are very dead against using Union as a precedent.

My question is going to be, is this actually something people would use a lot?

I don't think it would be used a ton. The moment you want to use it, it is very useful. One example is with the PSRs, the HTTP interfaces. Or if you want the link interface. Combining these multiple things gets it convenient. One of the reasons why I personally wanted as well, it's for streams. So currently, streams don't have any interface, don't have any classes. PHP basically internally checks when you call like certain string methods. For example, if you try to seek and you provide a user stream, it basically checks if you implement a seek method, which should be an interface. But you can't currently do that. Ideally, you would want to stream maybe like a base class, instead of having like a seekable stream, and rewindabe stream, or things like that. You basically just have interfaces. And then like if somebody wants a specific type of stream, just like a stream, which is seekable, which is rewindable. And other things. We already have that in SPL because there's an iterator. And we have a seekable iterator interface, which basically just ask: Oh, this is there's a seek method. I think it depends how you program. So if you separate the many things into interfaces, then you'll probably use intersections types a lot. If you use a maybe a more traditional PHP code base, which uses union types a lot. Union types are like going to be easier. And you want to reduce that.

Would you think that lots of people already use union types because it's pretty new as well. Isn't it?

Union types are being implemented in various different libraries. PSRs are updating the interfaces to use union types. One use case, I also have a special method, which was taken the date, it takes a union of like a DateTime interface, a string or an integer. Although intersections types are really new, you hear people when union types were being introduced, you heard people saying, I would promote bad cleaning habits, you shouldn't have one specific type. And if you're using a union, you have a design issue. And I had many people complaining to me why and intersection types of see? Why they haven't intersection types being introduced first, because intersection types are more useful. But then you see other people telling us like, I don't see the point in intersection types. Why would you use an intersection type, just use your concrete class, because that's what you're going to type anyway.

I can give you a reason why union types have implemented first, over intersection types, I think, which is that it's easier to implement.

It's easier to implement. And it's more useful for PHP as a whole, because PHP functions accepts a union or return a union. Functions return false for error states instead of null. It makes sense why union types were introduced first, because they are mostly more useful within the scope of what PHP does.

Do you think you have anything else to add about intersection types? At the moment, it's already up for voting, when is that supposed to end?

So the vote is meant to end on the 17th of June.

At the moment I see there's 15 votes for and two against so it's looking good. What's been your most pushback on this? If there was any at all?

Mostly: I don't see the point in it. However, I do think proper reasons why you don't want it, compared to like some other features where it's more like have thoughts on what you think design wise. But it is undeniable that you you add complexity to the variance. And to the variance check. It is already kind of complicated. I have like a hard time reading it initially. There's the whole parser hackery thing, which is kind of not great. It's probably just because we use like a restricted parser because it's faster and more efficient.

I think I spoke with Nikita about parsers some time ago and what the difference between them were. If I remember which episode it was all the to the show notes.

And I think the last reason against it is that it only accepts pure intersections. You could argue that, well, if you're adding intersections, you should add the whole feature set. It might impact the implementation of type aliases, because if you type alias T to be a union of A and B, and then you use type T in an intersection, you basically get a mixture of unions and intersections, that you need to be able to work with. The crux of this whole feature is the variance implementation. And being able to rationalize the variance implementation and been to extend it, I think it's the hardest bit.

I guess the next thing still missing would be type aliases, right? Like names for types, which you can't define just yet, which I think you also mentioned in the RFC is future scope.

Yeah.

Thank you, George, for taking the time today to talk to me about pure intersection types.

Thanks for having me on the show.

Hi I'm Derick, welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to explaining the latest developments in the PHP language. This is episode 87. Today I'm talking with Nikita Popov about a much smaller RFC this time: Deprecating Ticks. Nikita, would you please introduce yourself.

Hi Derick, I'm Nikita, and I'm working on PHP core development on behalf of JetBrains.

Let's jump straight into what this RFC is about, and that's the word ticks. What are ticks?

Ticks are a declare directive,. You write declare ticks equals one at the top of your file, and then PHP we'll call a tick function after every statement execution. Or if you write ticks equals two, then as we'll call it the function after every two statement executions.

Do you have to specify which function that calls?

Of course, so there is also a register tick function and unregister tick function and that's how you specify the function that should be called rather the functions.

How does this work, historically, because the RFC talks about the change being made in PHP seven?

Technically ticks work by introducing an opcode after every statement that calls the tick function depending on current count. The difference that was introduced in PHP seven is to what the tick declaration applies. The way PHP language semantics are supposed to work, is that declare directives are always local. The same way that strict types, only applies to a single file, ticks should also only apply to a single file. Prior to PHP seven, it didn't work out way. So if you had declare ticks, somewhere in your file, it would just enable ticks from that point forward. If you included the different file or even if the autoloader was triggered and included a different file that one would also make use of ticks. That was fixed in PHP seven, so now it is actually file local, but that also means that the ticks functionality at that point behaviour became, like, not very useful. Because usually if you want to use tics you actually want them to apply it to your whole codebase. There are ways around that. I'm afraid to say that people have approached me after this RFC and told me that they actually do that. The way around that is to register a stream wrapper. It's possible in PHP to unregister the file stream wrapper and register your own one, and then it's possible to intercept all the file includes and rewrite the file contents to include the declare ticks at the top of the file. I do use that general mechanism for real things in other places, but apparently people actually use that to like instrument, a whole application with ticks, and essentially restore the behaviour we had in PHP 5.

What was the intended use case for ticks to begin with?

Well I'm not sure what was the intended use case, but at least it was the main use case, and that's signal handling. In the PCNTL extension allows you to register a signal handler, and when the signal arrives, we can't just directly call that signal handler, because signals are only allowed to call functions without that our async signal safe. Which excludes things like memory allocation, and a lot of other things that PHP uses. What we do instead is we only set the flag that okay signal has arrived and then we have to actually run the signal handler at some later point in time. In PHP five, that worked using ticks. You declare ticks, and the PCNTL extension registered the tick handler, and then after this flag was set, it would execute your callback on the next tick. In PHP seven, an attentive mechanism was introduced, that is based on virtual machine interrupts. Those were originally introduced for time-out handling, because there we have a similar problem, that when timeout arrives, we might be in some kind of inconsistent state, like the middle of the allocator right now, and if we just bail out at that point, we are likely to see crashes down the road. So that was a significant problem in PHP five. PHP seven changed that. We now set an interrupt flag on timeout, and then the virtual machine checks this flag at certain points. The interrupt flag is not checked after every instruction, but only, like, just often enough to make sure that it's checked, at some point. So that you can't like go in an infinite loop, that ends up never checking. These points are basically function calls, and jumps that go higher up in the function, PCNTL signals can now use the same mechanism. If you call PCNTL async signals true, then those will also set the interrupt flag, and execute the signal handler on the next opportunity. The next time the interrupt flag is checked. The nice thing about that is that it's essentially free. I mean we already, we already have to do these checks for the interrupt like anyway, adding the handling for PCNTL signals doesn't add any cost on top. Unlike ticks, which have to be like executed on every instruction or at least regularly, and that does add significant cost.

Execution time itself because it's an opcode that needs to be executed.

Exactly.

So what are you proposing to do but the ticks in PHP eight one then?

I want to deprecate that. So both the declared directive itself, and the register tick function, unregister tick function.

How could users emulate the same behaviour as ticks allows them to do so now?

That's a good question. As I mentioned, if the use case is, use case of ticks was signal handling, then by using async symbols. If it was something else, then you have a problem. My assumption when writing this RFC was basically that signal handling was really the main remaining use case of ticks, because other use cases require this kind of you know stream wrapper instrumentation, and I didn't expect that people will be crazy enough to use something like that in production.

Hopefully they catch these rewritten files?

Probably yeah. I think it's possible to make this integrate with opcache. If you use it for other purposes, then, I don't think there is a really good replacement. So I think what they use it for is some kind of well instrumentation, so profiling, memory profiling, for example, and the alternative there of course is to use a tool that is appropriate for that job, for example, Xdebug contains a profiler, but of course it is not a production profiler, but I think there are also production profilers.

As far as I know all the production or APM solutions. They do this on their own without having to use sticks. They don't need any user land modifications.

Yeah, definitely. All the APM solutions support this, they use internal handlers.

Because it's actually removing functionalities that some people use, what's the reaction been to removing this functionality?

Well on the mailing list at least positive, but as I mentioned at least some people have like pointed out on the pull request that they are using the functionality.

Enough in such a way to sway for not deprecating them? What is the benefits of getting rid of ticks, if you don't use them?

That's, I think the thing, that there is not really a big benefit to getting rid of them. Like they don't add a lot of technical complexity to the engine. They're pretty simple in that sense. I haven't seen those responses. I'm kind of rolling a bit unsure if we should really remove them, because you could argue that well they don't really hurt anyone. I do have to say that I think all the things that people use sticks for, all the cases I have heard about, and all of those cases ticks are not the right way to solve the problem. They are not the right way to solve the signal handler problem, they are not the right way to solve the profiling problem. And the other one I heard is also they're not the right way to solve the heartbeat problem, to make sure a service stays connected. While people do use them I think they use them for questionable purposes.

Developers, if they're using something to rewrite the PHP file to introduce ticks, they can also technically rewrite a file to introduce calls to their own functions, after every statement.

Yes, I actually have a very nice PHP fuzzing project that rewrites PHP files to introduce instrumentation functions at certain points. That needs a lot more control than ticks, because it's interested in branching statements in particular. That is definitely also possible, but it's kind of even more crazy than just adding ticks. If you're doing it like this, I think, if we want to keep ticks, then we should change ticks from a declare directive to a ini_set, because this kind of rewriting of files to introduce takes that's like not a great solution. On the other hand, that does mean that if you are, I don't know a library, implementing some code and expecting that, you know, it just runs normally, then someone can with by enabling an ini setting will suddenly run code in the middle of your library file that's like essentially any point. So enabling ticks us a major behaviour change, that's something we really don't like to have in ini settings which is I guess also, why does it declare in the first place, because that limits the scope. And you have to go out of your way if you want to not limit it using this rewriting hack. So I'm not really sure ultimately what to do here.

Are you thinking of bringing this up for vote before PHP eight dot one's feature freeze?

If I decide to go for it, then definitely before. I'm just not completely sure on this topic yet.

it'd be interesting to, to hear what other people think about removing this. I have no opinion about this. Other features I do but in this case, I'm happy with them being there, I'm happy with them not being there, because it's something I'm using myself. In any case, thank you for going through this RFC with me today, and we'll see what happens.

Thanks for having me, Derick.