PHP Almost Generics: Guided Journey Through the Official Compile-Time Proposal

https://doganoo.medium.com/generics-in-php-from-blog-series-to-book-d2d4130bdeff

by dogano • 10 months ago

42 15 10 months ago

doganoo.medium.com

dado3212• 10 months ago

I'm glad that PHP has adopted more and more from Hack, Facebook's once fork and now completely separate language - https://hacklang.org/. It was never going to replace it (Go's success separate from Google has astounded me to be honest) but it heavily influencing PHP's direction feels like the best of both worlds.

that_guy_iain• 10 months ago

I think Facebook just forking the language instead of helping with development gave them the kick up the ass to sort out the development process. Then it just came down to having no one actually working on the language, so they needed to create the PHP Foundation to pay people to work on it because all the major companies left it behind (Yahoo, Facebook, Zend, etc). So it's good to see it managed to survive that chaos and become a pretty good language.

dochne• 10 months ago

The foundation is a very recent affair.

The real improvements all came from the hard work of the developers who were around during the 7.* releases who did excellent work.

Most importantly at that time we had Nikita Popov who was incredibly helpful.

Hack/HHVM definitely gave it a nice kick of motivation though.

andrewjf• 10 months ago

What do you mean “separate from google”? Golang’s success is directly and exclusively based on google envy back in 2009-2012.

lmm2• 10 months ago

Their point is that Golang has seen adoption and use outside the Google ecosystem, which is perhaps surprising, and something few other "company languages" have managed (e.g. Swift is actually quite a nice language design, but almost no-one uses it unless they're deeply involved with the Apple ecosystem).

zerocrates• 10 months ago

I think they mean success in terms of Go being used outside Google? Versus hack/hhvm which had a pretty narrow window where it saw some limited outside adoption.

gabesullice• 10 months ago

For an actual view of the syntax not behind a sign-in wall: https://thephp.foundation/blog/2025/08/05/compile-generics/

cheshire_cat• 10 months ago

Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44823272

patates• 10 months ago

Is this just a book promotion? Some text also gives me AI vibes.

PHP Almost Generics: Guided Journey Through the Official Compile-Time Proposal

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