Comment by talkin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by talkin | Hacker News Reader

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To be specific about static analysis: Lots of tools catch this. Sure, making some checks native would be nice, but for instance PHPStan always catches this, and more.

Regardless of the ‘improve the language angle’: Is somebody isn’t running PHPStan (or Psalm, Sonar, etc), then they’re missing out.

PHPStan is currently so good that using it should be non-negiotable. So the question would then even be: “I’d like rule 123 of the tool to be native, we helps with the RFC?”

I find these tools to not be too useful. The things they catch is like trying to force it to be an entirely different language, and don’t actually help with maintaining code. Then again, I’m usually writing low-level libraries that take advantage of quirks in the language for performance:

    $a = &$arr[]

Gives you a reference to null and appends it to the array. Then you can pass $a to something to mutate the tail “from a distance”. Most people never need this, nor should they use it. But when you are writing a streaming parser, it is quite handy as a one-liner instead of writing

    $a = null
    $arr[] = &$a

or keeping track of the current index and dealing with off-by-one errors.

For applications, these static analysis tools are great. For libraries, not so much.

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