Декларации на типови

While waiting for native support for typed arrays, here are a couple of alternative ways to ensure strong typing of arrays by abusing variadic functions. The performance of these methods is a mystery to the writer and so the responsibility of benchmarking them falls unto the reader.

PHP 5.6 added the splat operator (...) which is used to unpack arrays to be used as function arguments. PHP 7.0 added scalar type hints. Latter versions of PHP have further improved the type system. With these additions and improvements, it is possible to have a decent support for typed arrays.

<?php
declare (strict_types=1);

function typeArrayNullInt(?int ...$arg): void {
}

function doSomething(array $ints): void {
    (function (?int ...$arg) {})(...$ints);
    // Alternatively, 
    (fn (?int ...$arg) => $arg)(...$ints);
    // Or to avoid cluttering memory with too many closures
    typeArrayNullInt(...$ints);

    /* ... */
}

function doSomethingElse(?int ...$ints): void {
    /* ... */
}

$ints = [1,2,3,4,null];
doSomething ($ints);
doSomethingElse (...$ints);
?>

Both methods work with all type declarations. The key idea here is to have the functions throw a runtime error if they encounter a typing violation. The typing method used in doSomethingElse is cleaner of the two but it disallows having any other parameters after the variadic parameter. It also requires the call site to be aware of this typing implementation and unpack the array. The method used in doSomething is messier but it does not require the call site to be aware of the typing method as the unpacking is performed within the function. It is also less ambiguous as the doSomethingElse would also accept n individual parameters where as doSomething only accepts an array. doSomething's method is also easier to strip away if native typed array support is ever added to PHP. Both of these methods only work for input parameters. An array return value type check would need to take place at the call site.

If strict_types is not enabled, it may be desirable to return the coerced scalar values from the type check function (e.g. floats and strings become integers) to ensure proper typing.

The documentation lacks the information, that it's possible to change the return type of a method defined in an interface when the interface's methods return type is defined as `mixed`.

From the RFC:

"The mixed return type could be narrowed in a subclass as this is covariant and is allowed in LSP." (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/mixed_type_v2)

This means the following code is valid in PHP 8.0:

<?php

interface ITest
{
    public function apfel(): mixed; // valid as of 8.0
}

class Test implements ITest
{
    public function apfel(): array // more explicit
    {
        return [];
    }
}

var_dump((new Test())->apfel());
?>

You can see the result here: https://3v4l.org/PXDB6

For DNF type declarations (which lack an example), they're a mix of intersection and union types that look like this:
<?php

function send(c1|(c2&c3) $f) {}

?>

It's a union type where some of its options are intersection types, which are wrapped in parentheses ($f is something that is either a c1, or something that is both a c2 and a c3).