PHP Internals News: Episode 86: Property Accessors

Thursday, May 27th 2021, 09:14 BST

In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about the "Property Accessors" RFC.

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Transcript

Derick Rethans 0:14: Hi I'm Derick. Welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to explain the latest developments in the PHP language. This is episode 86. Today I'm talking with Nikita Popov about his massive property excesses RFC. Nikita, would you please introduce yourself?
Nikita Popov 0:32: Hi Derick, I'm Nikita, and I do work on PHP core development, on behalf of JetBrains.
Derick Rethans 0:39: This is probably the largest RFC I've seen in a while. What in one sentence, are you proposing to add to PHP here?
Nikita Popov 0:46: I would say it's an alternative to magic get and set, just for one specific property instead of all of them. That's the technical side. Maybe I should say something about the like motivation behind it, which is that since PHP seven four, we have type properties, that at least for me personally with that feature, the need to have this typical pattern of private property for storage, plus a public getter and setter methods, the main motivation for that has kind of gone away, because we can now use types to enforce any contracts on value. And now these getter and setter methods most if you like boilerplate. So the idea with accessors, at least my idea with accessors is that you really shouldn't use them. You should just have them as a backup option. You declare a public property in your class, and then maybe later, years later, it turns out that okay, that property actually requires additional validation. And right now if you have a public property, then you don't really have a good way of introducing that. Only way is to either break the API contract by converting the property into getter/setter methods where you can introduce arbitrary code, or by using magic get/set, which is definitely possible and persist the API contract, it's just fairly ugly.
Derick Rethans 2:09: You changes the public property that people could read into a private one. And because it's private, the set and get metric methods are being called.
Nikita Popov 2:18: Exactly.
Derick Rethans 2:19