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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Assess acceptability of having php-ds into core
From: larry@garfieldtech.com (Larry Garfield)

On 05/12/2016 08:27 PM, guilhermeblanco@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi internals,
>
> PHP 7 leverages a lot the performance internally and many PHP applications
> in the wild. Much of these improvement came by experimentation through
> PHPNG and the usage of efficient data structures internally. This idea of
> performance improvements are crucial to handle more requests, reduce server
> overload, etc.
>
> However, what lacks in PHP is the exposure of more efficient, use case
> specific data structures, that could allow end users to easily improve
> performance of their applications, instead of using a general,
> multi-purpose data structure that we have as "array".
>
> Based on that (please keep in mind I haven't spoken with library author),
> I'd like assess the receptability of incorporating php-ds library into core.
>
> Library author wrote a good (and lengthy) article explaining his motivation
> and performance benchmarks around it. Here are the related links:
>
> Article:
> https://medium.com/@rtheunissen/efficient-data-structures-for-php-7-9dda7af674cd
> Extension: https://github.com/php-ds/extension
> Polyfill: https://github.com/php-ds/polyfill
> Tests: https://github.com/php-ds/tests
> Benchmark: https://github.com/php-ds/benchmarks
>
>
> Best regards,

I am all for more efficient and performant tools being available 
natively.  However, the php-ds extension in particular, while it sounds 
very nice, is still missing what I believe are key collection-related 
operations, that is, set-level operations.  The equivalents of 
array_map, array_filter, first(callable) (ie, the first item that passes 
a given callable condition), etc. are all extremely powerful 
collection-level, functional operations.  We have array-based versions 
and have for many years, but having them on formal collections or 
objects has always been a sore point, and run into various road blocks 
of "arrays aren't objects", "but then we can't extend the set of 
operations", etc.  The pipe syntax currently being discussed helps some, 
but it's not as clean as doing it natively.

If we're going to improve the quality of our native collection tools, 
then a richer set of operations (for which there is a known list of 
common operations from most functional languages) needs to be part of 
that discussion.

--Larry Garfield