Lazy-objects are a bit magical. They are created empty and populate themselves on-demand. They are useful when an object is heavy to instantiate but is not always used, like for example Doctrine entities or Symfony lazy-services.

But do you know how they work internally? In this talk, I'll tell you about the mechanisms provided by PHP to enable such use cases 🧙. Because doing this sort of wizardry is not common practice, I'll also introduce you to two new traits that package those lazy-loading behaviors introduced in Symfony 6.2: one for virtual inheritance proxies, and one for ghost objects 👻.

While lazy objects used to require complex code generation, these new traits make it way easier to leverage them, opening up possible innovations; lazy arguments, lazy properties, or by-design lazy classes to name a few ones. What will you come up with? Let me know after you've seen this talk!