How PHP Developers Survived Without Generics Before Go Came Along

Software engineer Anton, who works primarily in PHP/Symfony and Go, reflects on the challenges of building type-safe code in PHP, a language that has no native generics support. In the absence of type parameters, PHP developers historically relied on interfaces, abstract base classes, mixed arrays, and duck typing to approximate type safety. Tools like Psalm and PHPStan later introduced comment-based generics via annotations such as @template, offering a real but limited form of static analysis. However, these annotation-based types remain vulnerable to silent drift, since they live in comments that can be edited without affecting runtime behavior. Anton now contrasts this era with his current Go-based services, where type constraints are enforced directly by the compiler rather than by convention or optional tooling.