Laravel BaseController vs \BaseController

Question

The default HomeController class is defined using

class HomeController extends BaseController {

However, when a resource controller is created via artisan, the class extends \BaseController instead of BaseController. Why is this, and what is the difference?

class TestResourceController extends \BaseController {

Answer 1

There is no difference (in a default installation). The \ simply tells PHP to use the root namespace instead of any other class with the same name but on a different namespace. If you were to create your own class called BaseController, PHP would not know which class to use unless it were explicity defined by the namespace, i.e. MyNamespace\BaseController.