Revisiting multiple inheritance in PHP

As it turns out, version 0.7 of the runkit extension for PHP has problems when copying methods from a class into another. Of course, this punts my original multiple inheritance simulation technique. The bug in detail: copying of methods from "parent" classes into the "child" class succeeds, but later on, when attempting to use a method, PHP requests ludicrous amounts of memory to the OS, which causes PHP to fail.

In lieu of that problem, I decided to explore alternatives. The final, usable alternative seems to be:

function inherits_from($destClassName,$srcClassNameList) {
    foreach ($srcClassNameList as $s) {
        runkit_class_adopt($destClassName,$s);
    }
}

And this version does work without the memory exhaustion problem. In short:

<?php

class A {
    ...A's methods here...
}

class B {
    ...B's methods here...
}

class C {
    ...C's methods here...
}

class MultipleInheritedClass {
    ...this class' methods here...
} inherits_from(
        'MultipleInheritedClass',
        array('A','B','C')
        );
?>

The inherits_from construct does the magic. All you need to type there is:

• The name of the "child" class
• An array containing the names of the "parent" classes

Of course, this technique works only in PHP 5, with the runkit extension.

Despite the cutting-edge requirements, I've just shown there's a practical way to build multiple inheritance in PHP. Mixin classes, aggregate classes, they're a few keystrokes away. Long live PHP!

Oh, by the way, did I mention that I built convenient RPM packages of runkit?