> Voting is now open on the Bound-Erased Generic Types RFC, as announced
> in the Intent to Vote message earlier this week.
>
> The vote started on 2026-06-14 at 16:50 UTC and ends on 2026-06-28 at 17:00
> UTC.
>
> RFC: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/bound_erased_generic_types
> Discussion thread: https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/130816
> Implementation: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/21969
To my own surprise, I am voting yes on this proposal.
I still believe that refied generics should be the goal. To that end,
I think we should be able to merge this and in minor versions, fix
"soundness" and implementation holes as "bug" fixes on that route. If
internals can agree on this, and then the community can communicate
this through education, promotion, documentation, etc, then this RFC
is simply a useful stepping stone.
This is based on my own experience playing with the RFC, which
included reporting 2 bugs in the implementation on the RFC. To be
honest, it's not too useful to me. I very quickly run up against some
limitation when trying to build useful things. Most notably, we need
to be able to define lower bounds (syntax pending, obviously):
class Option<+A>
{
// B >: A means B is an ancestor of A
// Since all As are Bs, you can return the A here
function get_or_default<B >: A>(Option $option, B $default): B
{
return $option->has_some()
? $option->get()
: $default;
}
// todo: the rest of the implementation
}
You can't take `A $default` and return `A` because this violates the
variance laws: a covariant type A cannot be used in parameter
position. So alternatively you could solve this with `inout A
$default` or similar.
This lower bound thing inevitably happens when I try working with
iterators too. But if the RFC passed, I would hope we could pass such
additional things without too much controversy.
