Roave/BetterReflection

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1247 stars · 138 forks observed · 2026-09-03

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Better Reflection is a PHP library providing an enhanced reflection API that can reflect on classes not yet loaded, from code strings, and expose ASTs of methods and functions. It is designed primarily for static analysis tooling rather than runtime use, where native PHP reflection is faster.

Use cases

• reflect on PHP classes without loading them
• extract AST from methods and functions
• analyze type declarations and doc blocks statically
• reflect on classes from a string of PHP code
• build static analysis or code quality tools
• inspect closures and return types in PHP 7 code

When to choose

• building static analysis tooling in PHP
• you need type information or ASTs that native reflection cannot provide
• you must inspect code without triggering autoloading

When to avoid

• runtime reflection in performance-sensitive applications
• you only need features native PHP reflection already offers
• you need to statically reflect on plain functions

Facets

library · maturity active

parser developer-tools developer-tools programming-languages php cli reflection static-analysis ast php code-introspection

Member repositories

For agents

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