Fabien Potencier is back with a new post on his site following up this article about application composition and Symfony 4. In his latest post he compares two approaches to applications: micro versus macro.

Monolith projects versus micro-applications; a never-ending debate. Both ways to develop applications are fine in my book. Symfony supports both. Even if the Symfony Standard Edition is probably more suitable for monolith projects as it depends on the symfony/symfony package.

[...] Silex took another approach where each individual components are required when needed. Does it make Silex simpler, more lightweight, or faster than Symfony? No. Nevertheless, Symfony 4 is going to be more similar to Silex in this regard.

He talks about changes upcoming in Symfony 4 including the move away from the "symfony/symfony" package system and in with a component/bundle driven system. He gets into a specific example around the "symfony-framework" bundle. He then comes back around to the idea of "composition" of applications, adding Symfony dependencies only when needed but still having them work together seamlessly. The post ends with a discussion that was had about going the "bundle-less application" route and, while Symfony 4 will recommend it, the bundle system will still function as expected.