Autoload path depth insanity

In the recent 2-3 years there have been a few major developments in the PHP community. I’d say the most notable ones were the creation of the PSR-0 autoloading standard and the dawn of the composer dependency manager.

The PSR proposals were originally based on the common ground between the projects pushing them. Today they dominate the way modern PHP libraries are written. I think it’s time to stop and think for a minute about how we really want our code and libraries to look like.

Update (2014-01-04)

The situation has improved. We now have a PSR-4 specification and support for this new standard in composer.

Thanks to everyone who made this happen.

Autoloading

While I believe that the creation of PSR-0 was extremely important for PHP, I no longer care about autoloading. The reason is simple: Composer made it irrelevant.

With composer you get autoloading for free, but even better: you now have a standard tool that can generate a classmap instantly. Classmap is one of the most performant ways to lazy-load classes and it does not even care which files they are in.

src
└── Symfony
    └── Component
        └── HttpKernel
            └── HttpKernelInterface.php

library
└── Zend
    └── Mvc
        └── Application.php

If you take a look at these two examples, they have something in common. Both of them contain a useless level of directory nesting. Both Symfony’s src and Zend Framework’s library directory contain only one single directory – as such it could be eliminated.

Of course PSR-0 would allow removing the src directory and having Symfony in the root directly (and some projects do that) but that’s not ideal, as you lose the ability of having a consistent directory for the source code.

Who will win the pointless nesting competition?

Here is an example from a library I wrote, called Ilias:

ilias
├── src
│   └── Igorw
│       └── Ilias
│           └── Program.php
└── tests
    └── Igorw
        └── Tests
            └── Ilias
                └── ProgramTest.php

Unlike the previously mentioned projects, this library is not part of a big organization. As you can see, there are not one, but two levels of unnecessary directory nesting. The name of my project is igorw/ilias, why would I care to repeat this information yet again in the directory structure?

And it gets even worse when look at the unit tests. The amount of nesting is reaching a level of ridiculousness that exceeds the amount of ignorance a human being can generate. I hate to say it, but this is annoying.

Side note: Fortunately PHPUnit does not care about autoloading, so I can shorten the test filename to tests/unit/ProgramTest.php, which also allows for a clean separation between unit, integration and functional tests. Thank you, Volker.

But instead of just complaining, I have a few suggestions that would greatly improve the way we deal with autoloading today, by introducing a sane amount of brevity.

It would allow the path to be shortened to src/Program.php.

Proposal

Based on PSR-0, these are the changes I would make:

• An autoloader must take a class_prefix option which defaults to null.

• If the class_prefix is not null and the FQCN begins with the class_prefix, the transformed class prefix must be stripped from the beginning filesystem path.

• The transformed class prefix is calculated by applying the following transformations to it:

  • If the last character is not a namespace separator, append one.
  • Convert each namespace separator to a DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.

Here are some examples:

class_prefix: Symfony
class name:   Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernelInterface
filename:             Component/HttpKernel/HttpKernelInterface.php

class_prefix: Zend
class name:   Zend\Mvc\Application
filename:          Mvc/Application.php

class_prefix: Igorw\Ilias
class name:   Igorw\Ilias\Program
filename:                 Program.php

The composer configuration could be something along these lines, the class prefix can be used both matching and for constructing the directory prefix:

{
    "autoload": {
        "psr-n": { "Igorw\\Ilias": "src" }
    }
}

Based on the feedback I receive I may write up a more detailed spec and a proof-of-concept implementation for submission to the PHP FIG.

FAQ

• Why not just use classmap?

  The main annoyance with classmap autoloading is that you must manually re- dump it every time a new class is added, which makes it unsuited for a development environment.

  Sure, you could hack together an autoloader that re-generates the class map if a class is not found, but I would strongly favour a clean solution over such hacks.

• Doesn’t composer’s target-dir fix this?

  Unfortunately, no. The target-dir is prepended to the entire package name, which means you will need to put code in your top level directory.

  What I am asking for is src/{$prefix}/Name.php, which is not possible with target-dir.

• But Symfony2 bundles do not have nesting and work fine.

  See the composer target-dir question above.

• Just use an IDE, it will solve all your problems!

  An IDE cannot fix the filesystem structure of a software project.

• What if the FIG does not like it?

  Depending on the feedback I receive, I may consider submitting a patch for composer anyway.

• <insert random insult here>

  Thanks man, I appreciate it.

Obligatory XKCD