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Hello,
Long time listener, first time caller here.
Last week I had a shower thought about how it would be neat if we could declare array shapes in PHP,
and use them to provide structural interfaces for arrays.
After all, arrays are one of PHPs strongest features, and anyone who has ever tried to use
arrays/maps in other languages after getting used to the versatility of PHP arrays will have to
admit that nothing comes close to their flexibility and ease of use.
However, ironically, most of my friends, colleagues and fellow PHP devs usually tend to shun PHP
arrays, which has led to the widespread use of Collection classes and the like. The usual argument
is that arrays don’t provide any way to declare their structure, and thus don’t provide the
ergonomics of autocompletion (even if you declare the array shapes with docblock annotations IDE
support is iffy at best) and don’t provide any form of runtime type checking.
To me, providing structural interfaces using shapes seems like a perfect fit to the flexibility of
arrays. I imagine you'd define them in a similar way to an interface, declaring and typing
array elements rather than methods or property hooks. They'd provide a way to validate the
contents of an array at runtime, and offer static analyzers and IDEs a robust way to do type
inspections and provide autocompletions for arrays.
Of course my first assumption was that other people much smarter than me probably already had this
idea, so I started doing my due diligence and discovered that a draft for a Shapes RFC was written
by Kacper Donat back in 2021 [1], but unfortunately seems to have since been abandoned. This is a
shame because it lines up about 90% with my ideas of what array shapes should look like in PHP.
I'm unable to find any reference to this RFC on the PHP Wiki nor could I find any threads
discussing it in the PHP-Internals archive, so I assume they simply never got around to completing
it, or there was some discussion elsewhere that prompted them to abandon the RFC.
Anyway, I would love to try and push this idea forward – either by contacting Kacpar, or writing
my own RFC – and have a shot at implementing a proof of concept, but first I would like to get a
feel for whether this proposal would find much footing here.
So please let me know how you feel about the idea of array shapes in PHP, and perhaps read the draft
written by Kacper Donat [1] for a much more eloquent example of what I'm trying to propose
here.
Thank you all very much in advance.
Kindest regards,
Alwin Garside
[1] https://hackmd.io/@kadet/php-rfc-shapes