PHP debug_backtrace in production code to get information about calling method?

Question

Is there a compelling reason to not use debug_backtrace for the sole purpose of determining the calling method's class, name, and parameter list? Not for debugging purposes. It has the word "debug" in the function name, which makes me feel a little dirty to be using it in this way, but it fit the bill for what I needed to do (a single function that can be called from many places and needs to call the calling method from another system). It works, but is this still a bad idea? If so, why?

Answer 1

It does feel a little dirty, but as has been well documented, opined, and beaten to death elsewhere, PHP isn't a system designed for elegance.

One highly convoluted reason not to use debug_backtrace for application logic is it's possible some future developer working on PHP could decide "it's just a debug function, performance doesn't matter".

If you're interested in a "better" way of doing this, you could probably use PHP's magic constants to pass in the calling method and class name, and then use a ReflectionMethod object to extract any other information you need.

I put better in quotes because, while this would be cleaner and more correct, the overhead of instantiating a Reflection object may be greater than using the debug_backtrace function.