Get the reference count of an object in PHP?

Question

I realize the knee-jerk response to this question is that \"you dont.\", but hear me out.

Basically I am running on an active-record system on a SQL, and in order to

Answer 1

PHP 7.4 now has WeakReference

To know if $obj is referenced by something else or not, you could use:

// 1: create a weak reference to the object
$wr = WeakReference::create($obj);

// 2: unset our reference
unset($obj);

// 3: test if the weak reference is still valid
$res = $wr->get();
if (!is_null($res)) {
    // a handle to the object is still held somewhere else in addition to $obj
    $obj = $res;
    unset($res);
}