Since PHP 8 introduces attributes, the future justification for this project is probably in question.
I've already voiced this thought to @aik099 who largely took over development after me, and he basically agreed.
I basically have one reservation about retiring this project.
There is one feature this project has that you don't get with PHP 8 attributes, and that's the doc-block syntax. Sometimes, you have doc-blocks that are there for two reasons: both for documentation, and for a piece of code to pick it up.
So if you still need doc-blocks for certain things, there's a chance you could end up having to duplicate certain information between a doc-block for documentation purposes, and an attribute for run-time purposes.
Probably the best example is things like @param, @type and @return annotations, but with the introduction of e.g. return-types and typed properties since the inception of this project, this may have limited usefulness as well.
So, is there still a reason for this project to exist?
If yes: likely this project needs to actually support PHP 8 attributes, so you would get both types of annotations from a single function-call. (Note that this is not what was recently introduced, which is just compatibility with PHP 8, which you can rely on while transitioning to attributes.)
If no: likely the project is ready to officially retire.
Note that I don't use annotations (or attributes) myself, so I have no interest in pursuing future development of this project either way. The project gets ~1500 installs/month, about half of which is from @aik099's QA-tools project, so I figured I'd ask the community to comment before officially retiring the project, since it doesn't sound like @aik099 intends to maintain it either.
If someone else is interested in taking over, I'd be happy to hand it off as well.
Since PHP 8 introduces attributes, the future justification for this project is probably in question.
I've already voiced this thought to @aik099 who largely took over development after me, and he basically agreed.
I basically have one reservation about retiring this project.
There is one feature this project has that you don't get with PHP 8 attributes, and that's the doc-block syntax. Sometimes, you have doc-blocks that are there for two reasons: both for documentation, and for a piece of code to pick it up.
So if you still need doc-blocks for certain things, there's a chance you could end up having to duplicate certain information between a doc-block for documentation purposes, and an attribute for run-time purposes.
Probably the best example is things like
@param,@typeand@returnannotations, but with the introduction of e.g. return-types and typed properties since the inception of this project, this may have limited usefulness as well.So, is there still a reason for this project to exist?
If yes: likely this project needs to actually support PHP 8 attributes, so you would get both types of annotations from a single function-call. (Note that this is not what was recently introduced, which is just compatibility with PHP 8, which you can rely on while transitioning to attributes.)
If no: likely the project is ready to officially retire.
Note that I don't use annotations (or attributes) myself, so I have no interest in pursuing future development of this project either way. The project gets ~1500 installs/month, about half of which is from @aik099's QA-tools project, so I figured I'd ask the community to comment before officially retiring the project, since it doesn't sound like @aik099 intends to maintain it either.
If someone else is interested in taking over, I'd be happy to hand it off as well.