I don’t believe this style of doc annotation is used elsewhere. What’s the purpose of this?

I think the purpose is to tell the IDE that the function receives a type and returns that exact type.

Just for my curiosity, what IDE are you using? :)

In D25576#16575, @speck wrote:

I don’t believe this style of doc annotation is used elsewhere. What’s the purpose of this?

It is to indicate language server aware editors what type the object has and this results in code completion to work:

For more details, see here:

https://phpstan.org/blog/generics-in-php-using-phpdocs#type-variables

Unless we can come up with a better/more common notation to show this information, I'm +1 on this - I like static type information, and this one looks fine to me.
I'm not familiar with many PHP tools - is there another notation somewhere?

AFAIK, this https://we.phorge.it/book/arcanist/function/id/ is the only thing we do with the annotation (other then having it for humans). I don't think we have any home-grown static type checks.

In D25576#16603, @avivey wrote:

Unless we can come up with a better/more common notation to show this information, I'm +1 on this - I like static type information, and this one looks fine to me.
I'm not familiar with many PHP tools - is there another notation somewhere?

Seems like there is not a standard for it, but many of the implementation seem to support it:

• https://phpactor.readthedocs.io/en/master/reference/types.html?highlight=template#generic-types
• https://phpstan.org/blog/generics-in-php-using-phpdocs#type-variables
• https://intelephense.com/

AFAIK, this https://we.phorge.it/book/arcanist/function/id/ is the only thing we do with the annotation (other then having it for humans). I don't think we have any home-grown static type checks.

I think I'll tinker in my extensions with these toolings 🤔

Maybe at one point, if it provides any values, we can adopt some of these techniques into core.