What are some alternative approaches to achieving type safety in PHP, as suggested in the forum discussion?

The issue with achieving type safety in PHP is that the language itself is not statically typed, leading to potential runtime errors due to type mismatches. One approach to address this is by using PHPDoc annotations to specify types, which can be enforced by static analysis tools like PHPStan or Psalm. Another approach is to use scalar type declarations introduced in PHP 7, which allow specifying parameter and return types for functions and methods.

/**
 * @param int $num1
 * @param int $num2
 * @return int
 */
function add(int $num1, int $num2): int {
    return $num1 + $num2;
}