Hi internals, The ext/xml extension currently has GC issues, see https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=76874. The tl;dr is that uses of xml_parser will usually result in a cyclic structure, but resources do not support cycle GC. This means that the user is required to take care of breaking GC cycles manually, which is very unusual for PHP.
I would like to port the xml extension from using a resources towards using an object, which is fully GC integrated. This is implemented in https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/3526. An XmlParser class is used instead of a resource. The class is final and cannot be manually constructed. It is still used with the normal xml_parser_* APIs. This is intended as an internal representation change, not a conversion to OO APIs. The xml_parser_free() method becomes effectively a no-op and may be deprecated in some future version. This change is intended for PHP 7.4. While it is technically BC breaking (in that code that goes out of the way to use is_resource or similar may break), but we've done a couple of these resource->object migration in minor versions in the past (ref https://wiki.php.net/rfc/operator_overloading_gmp and https://wiki.php.net/rfc/hash-context.as-resource). Any thoughts? Regards, Nikita
