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Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 12:24:33 +0200
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Subject: RFC: Storing additional information for op_arrays
From: stefan.esser@sektioneins.de (Stefan Esser)

Hi everyone,

I would like to use this list to address the major players in bytecode
caching tools: Zend, APC, Xcache...

One problem I and others have run into is that from time to time we need
to store extra information for specific opcode arrays. For simple values
it is possible to use one of the reserved slots in the op_array
structure, but in the past that has been unrelieable because APC for
example simply overwrote the first slots without asking the Zend Engine
to reserve some space.

The next problem is that the amount of data you can store is not that big.
Leaving a pointer in the reserved field is also not a good idea, because
this will break as soon the opcode array is shared among processes or
was stored on the disk.

Therefore it would be great if we can come up with a modification of the
op_array structure that allows extensions to append arbitrary sized data
to an op_array, that gets also cached by all the opcode cachers...

What do you think?

Stefan Esser