carthage-software/mago 1.0.0-alpha.10

Mago 1.0.0-alpha.10

on GitHub

This is a landmark release! 🎉 We are thrilled to introduce comprehensive support for by-reference analysis, a major step forward in Mago's ability to understand complex PHP code. Alongside this huge new feature, this release continues our focus on polishing the formatter and improving the accuracy of the type system.

✨ Major Feature: By-Reference Analysis

Mago now understands by-reference semantics! This is a foundational feature that replaces previous "unsupported operation" warnings with deep, accurate static analysis.

• Core Operations Support: The analyzer now correctly processes all major by-reference operations, including assignment ($a = &$b), passing arguments to by-reference parameters, returning by-reference, foreach loops (foreach ($arr as &$value)), and use (&$var) in closures.
• Context-Aware Constraint Validation: Mago reports detailed, helpful errors for reference constraint violations. The error messages are tailored to the source of the constraint, explaining why a variable's type is restricted (e.g., because it's a global, static, a by-ref parameter, or was passed as an argument to a method).
• Robust Branch Reconciliation: The logic for merging variable states from if/else branches has been completely rewritten to accurately handle by-reference variables in conditional scopes.

💅 Formatter Fixes

We've continued to refine the formatter for more stable and predictable output.

• Idempotent Comment Handling: Fixed several bugs where comments could be lost or mangled during formatting, especially around the closing parenthesis ) of function calls and between if/else blocks separated by blank lines. The formatter is now more robust and idempotent.
• Whitespace Consistency: The formatter now correctly handles tab characters (\t) as insignificant whitespace, preventing them from causing incorrect layout decisions around trailing comments.

⚙️ Other Fixes & Improvements

• Analyzer & Codex:
  • Smarter Docblocks: The scanner now intelligently prioritizes tool-specific tags, preferring @psalm-* then @phpstan-* over generic @var and @return tags to ensure the most specific type is always used.
  • Dogfooding: We're now running mago analyze on our own Composer plugin in CI! This has already helped us find and fix a bug in template type inference related to empty arrays.
• Stubs:
  • Added more stubs for the imagick extension, improving analysis for projects that use it. Thanks, @Bleksak!

Closed Issues

This release closes the following issues:

• #287
• #290
• #291
• #292
• #294
• #295

Full Changelog: 1.0.0-alpha.9...1.0.0-alpha.10