PHP RFC: Nullsafe Calls

• Version: 1.0
• Date: 2014-12-09
• Author: Josh Watzman (jwatzman@fb.com), Drew Paroski
• Status: Obsolete
• First Published at: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/nullsafe_calls

The RFC has been returned to draft stage after discussion on internals in order to figure out how to deal with short circuiting. See the “open issues” section below. The rest of the RFC currently stands as originally submitted to internals.

This RFC proposes a new operator, the “nullsafe” operator ?->, which allows safe chaining of method calls. This is useful to easily propagate errors forward to the end of a computation which should fail if any of its sub-computations should fail.

A very common pattern is to have some a computation consisting of a series of method calls, any one of which can return null. If any of them do return null, the entire computation should fail. Right now, writing something like this in PHP requires a bunch of boilerplate checks after each call. For example:

function f($o) {
  $o2 = $o->mayFail1();
  if ($o2 === null) {
    return null;
  }
 
  $o3 = $o2->mayFail2();
  if ($o3 === null) {
    return null;
  }
 
  $o4 = $o3->mayFail3();
  if ($o4 === null) {
    return null;
  }
 
  return $o4->mayFail4();
}

This certainly works, but it's a lot of boilerplate for a fairly common pattern, and it's also a lot of explicit checks that the runtime must do. Instead, a new operator is added to the language: ?->. Calling $obj?->foo(..) behaves identically to $obj->foo(..) if $obj is not null. If $obj is null, then it returns null.

This means that calls using this new operator can be chained together. For example, the code above, rewritten with the new operator:

function f($o) {
  return $o?->mayFail1()?->mayFail2()?->mayFail3()?->mayFail4();
}

If $obj is null, when $obj?->foo(..) executes, the arguments will still be evaluated. In other words, ?-> does not have short circuit semantics when evaluating arguments.

This is done because it parallels what the -> operator does. The arguments are evaluated whether or not the function being called actually consumes them. Furthermore, ?-> is effectively an error suppression/propagation mechanism. This means that its usage should not affect the way arguments are evaluated; doing anything else would be very confusing for the programmer.

It's worth noting that this point has deep implications for the implementation, which must at least begin to actually execute the call opcode, so that arguments can be evaluated. It cannot simply be implemented as a syntactic transform into a ternary or similar!

For the purpose of clarity, some implications of the above definition; all of these stem from consistency between -> and ?->, and trying to avoid strange behavioral changes when the left-hand side is or is not null.

• If $obj is an object whose class does not define a method “foo”, then $obj?->foo(..) will still raise a fatal error.
• If $obj is anything other than null or object, then $obj?->foo(..) will still raise a fatal error.

• C#, CoffeeScript, and Groovy all have a “safe navigation operator” which was the original inspiration for this feature.
• Haskell has the “maybe monad”, which syntactically looks quite different but morally provides a similar mechanism to propagate any failure in a computation forward to the end of the computation.
• Hack has already implemented a proposal identical to this one.

Due to an implementation detail, this decreases the maximum number of arguments a function can be called with from 2^32 to 2^31, and adds an error when that limit is reached. (The engine would previously just wrap around, to potentially disastrous consequences.)

This is just a technicality... all of my attempts to actually hit that limit put my machine into swapdeath long before I got close

See also “RFC Impact To Existing Extensions” below.

PHP7.

Extensions have access to an opline's extended_value, and the current implementation re-uses a single bit at the top of it for a new purpose. This is a backwards compatibility break for extensions which read the extended_value out of the “begin fcall” opcode -- though arguably extensions like RunKit which do this probably shouldn't be anyways ;)

If this impact is deemed too much, there are certainly other implementation options, which I think are less attractive. We could add a new OP_DATA opcode after the begin fcall, but that seems like dramatic overkill for storing a single bit.

Nothing accessible from outside the internals of the engine.

Make sure there are no open issues when the vote starts!

The behavior for (not) short circuiting argued for above is not clearly the right behavior. There are actually at least three meaningful possibilities here. I'm currently investigating implementation feasibility in both PHP7 and in HHVM, as well as generally thinking about what the right thing to do is, and will bring the discussion back up on internals once I've got my thoughts together better.

As a quick preview, the three options can be seen as to how to desugar the following code. I'm not going to argue for or against any of them yet, just show what the range of possibilities are. (I also haven't extensively looked at the following examples, they might have errors or just not make sense, I need more time to put this together properly, dumping here for completeness only, please wait for the full revised proposal to internals :))

$r = $x?->a(f())->b(g());

Arguments are evaluated even if we are doing the nullsafe call on null.

$_tmp1 = f();
$_tmp2 = g();
$_tmp3 = $x === null ? null : $x->a($_tmp1);
$r = $_tmp3->b($_tmp2);

Arguments are not evaluated if we are doing the nullsafe call on null. The nullsafe behavior only applies to the single function call where the nullsafe operator is used.

$_tmp1 = $x === null ? null : $x->a(f());
$r = $_tmp1->b(g());

Arguments are not evaluated if we are doing the nullsafe call on null. The nullsafe behavior applies to all calls chained after the nullsafe operator.

$r = $x === null ? null : $x->a(f())->b(g());

This RFC does not change any existing PHP behavior, including the -> operator, the ?? operator, the @ operator, or other error suppression mechanisms.

The ?-> operator is not valid to use for a member access, and will generate an E_COMPILE_ERROR if this is attempted. Defining such functionality is left to a further RFC.

This is pretty clearly a core language change and so requires 2/3. The vote will be a straight yes/no vote on accepting the new operator.

• php-src: I have a branch at https://github.com/jwatzman/php-src/compare/nullsafe-prototype?expand=1 with a working implementation. Includes tests copied from HHVM's implementation.
• PHP spec: not yet, but will do if the RFC is accepted.
• PHP docs: import Hack's documentation when they add it: https://github.com/hhvm/hack-hhvm-docs/issues/360 (that task will get completed well before this RFC is voted on, accepted, merged, etc)

After the project is implemented, this section should contain

1. the version(s) it was merged to
2. a link to the git commit(s)
3. a link to the PHP manual entry for the feature

HHVM's implementation for the Hack language is at https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/commit/8fd5a78b02d2d62538e77fcbc927df759c1722f9.

Keep this updated with features that were discussed on the mail lists.