RSS (general)Antony got the idea to implement a C-like array wrapper in SPL: SplFastArray. The main advantage of that class is performance, it's indeed faster than PHP arrays. How so? No free lunch: The speedup comes from the fact that non-numeric indexes are not allowed and that the array is of fixed size (which means no hashing and continuous memory storage). That said, here is a quick example:
<?php
$a = new SplFastArray(4); // takes the initial size as first argument
$a[0] = "foo";
$a[2] = "gee";
$a[3] = "plop";
$a->setSize(3);
$a->setSize(5); // increase the size
foreach($a as $k=>$v) {
var_dump($v);
}
/* Output:
* string(3) "foo"
* NULL
* string(3) "gee"
* NULL
* NULL
*/
?>
The speedup seems to vary between different environments, but so far the multiple benchmarks showed that SplFastArray was 10~30% faster than standard PHP arrays.
Great idea. I am glad to see this was committed to 5.3. Thanks :)