{"id":1299,"date":"2026-05-11T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wade.one\/blog\/?p=1299"},"modified":"2026-05-11T18:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T17:00:00","slug":"php-8-5-nodiscard-is-a-small-api-safety-feature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wade.one\/blog\/2026\/05\/11\/php-8-5-nodiscard-is-a-small-api-safety-feature\/","title":{"rendered":"PHP 8.5 NoDiscard Is a Small API Safety Feature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><code>#[\\NoDiscard]<\/code> is not the biggest PHP 8.5 feature, but it is one I expect to age well. A lot of production bugs come from a function returning something important and the caller quietly ignoring it. Sometimes that is harmless. Sometimes it means a lock was not acquired, a validation result was dropped, or an immutable object update never actually got used.<\/p>\n<p>The PHP manual now documents the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.php.net\/manual\/en\/class.nodiscard.php\">NoDiscard attribute<\/a>, and the <a href=\"https:\/\/wiki.php.net\/rfc\/marking_return_value_as_important\">RFC<\/a> describes it as a way to mark return values as important. PHP 8.5 can warn when the return value is discarded, which brings a useful static-analysis idea closer to the language itself.<\/p>\n<p>I would use this sparingly. If every non-void function gets marked, the signal gets noisy and developers learn to ignore it. It makes more sense on methods where dropping the result is almost always wrong: immutable <code>with*()<\/code> methods, validation helpers, lock attempts, transaction-style APIs, parsing results, or functions that return a changed copy rather than modifying in place.<\/p>\n<p>This is the kind of feature that improves code review more than code writing. It turns &#8220;remember to use the returned value&#8221; from tribal knowledge into something the code can say for itself. That is a good trade: a little extra metadata in the API, fewer silent mistakes later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>PHP 8.5&#8217;s NoDiscard attribute gives library and application code a direct way to say that ignoring a return value is probably a bug.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[28,13],"tags":[151,150,35,36],"class_list":["post-1299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-php","category-programming","tag-api-design","tag-nodiscard","tag-php","tag-php-8-5"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - 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