Php8

#[Route('/orders/{id}', methods: ['GET'])] public function show(int $id): Response Symfony 5.2 accepts this on PHP 8, and the annotation era quietly starts to end. Same shape as the annotation, but now it is language, not a comment. The engine parses it, static analysis sees it, a typo is a compile-time complaint instead of a route that silently does not exist. Doctrine and the validator are heading the same way. Everything that lived in docblocks will move over the next year or two. ...

JIT on, JIT off, the same Symfony endpoint. Difference within noise. Same for a Laravel endpoint. PHP 8.0 came out yesterday and this was the first thing I checked, because every headline is about the JIT. Not a scandal. A web request spends its time in I/O, in MySQL, in framework code full of method calls the JIT cannot do much with. JIT is for tight numeric loops, and your controller has none. If you compute fractals in PHP, congratulations. The rest of us can leave it off. ...

@param int|string $id. I grepped one service this morning: dozens of those, and every one is a wish. The docblock says what the signature could not. First alpha of PHP 8 came out last week, and native union types turn the wish into a contract, checked at runtime and by tooling. Half of my phpdoc can go. Everyone writes about the JIT. I keep thinking about the less shiny thing: how many of our daily patterns exist only to compensate for a missing language feature, and are about to become legacy. ...