PHP · RFC Watch
Voting opens on PHP's fifth function autoloading RFC
Paul M.
Jones has opened the vote on the Function Autoloading (mark 5) RFC for PHP. Voting runs two weeks and closes automatically at 14:45 UTC on Thursday, 13 August 2026. The proposal addresses concerns about shadowed global functions, noting they are rare in practice and easily mitigated.
Paul M. Jones has opened the voting phase for the Function Autoloading (mark 5) RFC, as announced on the PHP internals mailing list. The proposal is documented on the PHP wiki under the name function-autoloading-five-oh and represents the fifth attempt at introducing an autoloading mechanism for functions, analogous to the class autoloading PHP has long supported.
The vote runs for two weeks and closes automatically at 14:45 UTC on Thursday, 13 August 2026.
Jones directly addresses a recurring objection: the case of shadowed global functions, where a namespaced function call could unexpectedly resolve to a global function. According to the RFC, such cases exist in principle but are extremely rare in practice, and the few affected codebases can be mitigated easily. A dedicated section of the wiki page covers how common the shadowed-global case actually is.
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