Autoloading a separate, Laravel application into Lumen

Question

I'm writing an API for an existing Laravel application using Lumen. So as to allow the API's controllers to access the Laravel app's models, I've added the Laravel app as a git submodule, and set it to autoload into the "Main" namespace via the composer.json file:

"psr-4": {
        "App\\": "app/",
        "Main\\": "main/app/"
    }

This works fine, but I wanted to ask what impact this will have on memory usage. Is the entire Laravel app being loaded into memory (thus causing a performance drop), or is the Lumen app just being told "where to look" when a Main\Model class is referenced?

Thanks

Answer 1

As this process uses standard PHP autoloading functionality under the hood, classes are loaded ad-hoc if not already defined, rather than them each being loaded initially.