Re: [PHP-DEV] [Discussion] Revisiting typed closures

On Thu, Jul 2, 2026, at 2:14 PM, Larry Garfield wrote:

> On the question of callable-vs-closure, I agree that today, between FCC 
> and PFA a Closure is absolutely trivial to produce, so we don't need to 
> support the variety of legacy callable formats.  The one caveat to that 
> is for compiled code; you cannot store a closure in a serialized form 
> or in generated code; functions and static methods are easy enough to 
> store that way (as a string and array, respectively), ugly as those 
> formats are.  Methods, anon functions, etc. however are much harder, 
> and there's no globally standard way of cheating there.  I suspect the 
> best we can do without scope creeping ourselves to death is just 
> support closures and leave it to implementers to turn other callable 
> formats into a closure, which isn't that hard these days.

I just realized one caveat to the above: Invokable objects.  There's little point in doing $callableObj(...), other than the implementation of callable objects is kinda screwy right now and isn't part of any type.  A callable type definition should support callable objects without forcing the user to squeeze them through closures.

--Larry Garfield