PHP 7 has brought us improved support for Types, making us less reliant-upon annotations. Yet we still can't signal that a method should return an array of User objects: function foo() : User[]

What makes an Array of Users so special? What if we'd like to return a HashMap of a given key & value?

We'll explore use-cases for defining composite objects and leveraging Generics to avoid repeating ourselves.

In 2016, Ben Scholzen and Rasmus Schultz drafted an RFC for "Generics in PHP" https://wiki.php.net/rfc/generics

Having worked with these constructs in Java and C# in past lives, I can offer several examples of practical use-cases for them, and help bolster a case for their adoption in PHP.

In the end, we should arrive at how they would nicely complement the most recent enhancements to PHP7's Type System.