> 100 total devs, over 10 years of development, with the codebase spanning 5k files and over 1 million LoC.

OK, so your codebase is certainly large, ungodly large, and frankly worrisome, but that alone isn't that all that interesting. Is it possible to feed my curiosity and supply queries/sec? :)

> ... any simpleton can make it so that all you see is a single include, but that doesn't stop the fact that you must still manually include each and every other file -- at some point in the framework -- before you can use it.

No, you only need to include the files you actually use. When you use them.

There's a strong argument to be had for being explicit, especially once performance becomes a concern.

The thread here is about arguing for autoload on performance grounds, and my opposition to such.

> pretty much every modern framework uses autoloading.

Pretty much every framework is crap, and a very bad way to build larger, complex systems, and maintain them over time. The majority of them are CMS and conventional website oriented, and apply poorly to other use cases. But you are perfectly welcome to limit your perceptions based upon what you consider to be modern and popular frameworks if you wish; it's entirely possible that - as I suspect - my experiences going beyond the above are a bit abnormal.

> Removing include calls does not make the code more complex nor harder to follow, any decent IDE will let you control-click into the definition of classes. I'd argue that less LoC is a good thing (so long as we're not talking about "clever code", which this isn't).

If you are looking at a block of code and the execution flow is dependent on an entire framework's dependency resolution mechanism (autoload or similar), with inexplicit dependencies, then it seems to be an obtuse perspective to argue that the code has not lost the property of being explicit.

> Even with this simple example, the non-require version is 2000x's faster than the require version. This is also in a perfect world, e.g. there's no other files also being required that'd overflow the realpath cache, nor is there really any other OS activity that will hamper my tests. In the wild, there could be 50-100 requests being served concurrently, which would affect the system calls even more.

First of all, clarity of code is far more important than performance in almost every case. If you really want to justify the lack of explicit dependencies on a performance basis, my point is that it's not possible.

> with this simple example, the non-require version is 2000x's faster than the require version

Err, here's what I got.

test1: 0.0000250
test2: 0.0177090
test3: 0.0062518 (same as test2 but with require_once instead of require)

Yeah the overhead is larger, no it doesn't really mean anything. However you include, you still have to include. not including is faster than require_once() is faster than require(). Nothing shocking there. I believe if you add APC and php-cgi and/or tmpfs as a mountpoint (vs. raw disk) this will decrease markedly, with no requirement to alter code.

I remain unconvinced.

Props on the custom framework vibe, IMHO every time I've looked, what's out there prebuilt is all crap (not relevant for anything but web-only, OO-centric, high overhead both performance and cognitive).