In this article, we will take a look at the optimisation technique of converting built-in functions to opcodes. This will involve firstly taking a look at how it has been used upon a number of functions in the latest PHP 7.2 release for greater performance. We will then go on to write our own implementation to optimise the ord function for a more in-depth look at the application of this optimisation technique.

In this article, we will be implementing two new language constructs: echoln and println. These will be the counterparts of echo and print, where they will append a new line (\n) to their outputs. This will be done by extending the ZEND_ECHO opcode (used by echo and print) to prevent unnecessary code duplication.

In this follow-up article to Implementing a Range Operator in PHP, we redo part of the previous implementation to remove several of the limitations it had. I will show how these limitations (around the handling of the operator in constant expression contexts) can be removed by shifting the operator's logic out of the VM and into the compiler to support compile-time evaluations - a necessity to enable for the operator to be used in constant expression contexts.

This article will demonstrate how to implement a new operator in PHP. This will involve updating the lexer, parser, compiler, and VM to support this new syntax. This will provide a brief overview of a number of PHP's internal aspects, particularly the stages PHP's interpreter goes through when executing PHP code.

The digit separator provides developers with a way to format numerical literals in code. This provides greater readability to large numbers by breaking them into sub-groups, where a character (the underscore, in this case) acts as a delineator.

This article will explain how we can add this relatively simple feature into PHP.