PHP compile time generics: yay or nay?
One of the most sought-after features for PHP is Generics: The ability to have a type that takes another type as a parameter. It's a feature found in most compiled languages by now, but implementing generics in an interpreted language like PHP, where all the type checking would have to be done at runtime, has always proven Really Really Hard(tm), Really Really Slow(tm), or both. But, experimentation by the PHP Foundation's dev team suggests we may be able to get 80% of the benefit for 20% of th