> you will prefer to manually specify required libraries and maintain a closer understanding of control flow at all times.
Manually specifying the libraries creates the problem in the first place -- it's a very difficult problem when your dependencies have dependencies and so on. You have code that depends on resource A but doesn't use resource A on every request; how do you manage something like that manually in a huge project?
> Sure, you will have slightly longer interpreting time
If you have a large framework almost everything depends on everything else. So you end up loading and interpreting 100% of your framework on every request. Even worse, you load it all at the start of the request! If you code only uses a small fraction, lets say 20%, of the framework and only loads and interprets it on demand that will make a difference.
> While I'm all for low-hanging performance fruit, this particular approach ('autoload') costs too much and delivers too little to be generally praiseworthy, whilst harming simplcity.
I don't much care about the performance considerations but I find autoloading far simpler than manually specifying every dependency. In fact, most modern languages don't bother with that either -- going back to C/C++ from Java/C# gives the same sort of pain. I'm not sure why you think it "costs too much" given it's likely to cost less in performance and code written. Performance was not the main concern for the addition of autoloading.
Manually specifying the libraries creates the problem in the first place -- it's a very difficult problem when your dependencies have dependencies and so on. You have code that depends on resource A but doesn't use resource A on every request; how do you manage something like that manually in a huge project?
> Sure, you will have slightly longer interpreting time
If you have a large framework almost everything depends on everything else. So you end up loading and interpreting 100% of your framework on every request. Even worse, you load it all at the start of the request! If you code only uses a small fraction, lets say 20%, of the framework and only loads and interprets it on demand that will make a difference.
> While I'm all for low-hanging performance fruit, this particular approach ('autoload') costs too much and delivers too little to be generally praiseworthy, whilst harming simplcity.
I don't much care about the performance considerations but I find autoloading far simpler than manually specifying every dependency. In fact, most modern languages don't bother with that either -- going back to C/C++ from Java/C# gives the same sort of pain. I'm not sure why you think it "costs too much" given it's likely to cost less in performance and code written. Performance was not the main concern for the addition of autoloading.