Types Erasure

Type Erasure is the removal of type annotations from the source code when going to production.

There may be several goals with this operation:

• Handle unsupported types, such as generics. They are supported by tooling, but not by the PHP engine, so after using them during development phase, they are removed

• Speed up production code by removing execution-time checks. This requires that types are safe and sound

Type erasure is a transformation tool, akin to transpiling, that convert the developed code into production code: it is run at deployment stage.

One alternative to type erasure is monomorphization, where every needed type is created.

Documentation

See also mrsuh/php-generics and Bound Erased Generic Types.

Related : Type System, Deployment, Transpile, Monomorphization, Generics, Performance, Type Checking