5.3!!!

After a long string of delays, PHP 5.3 is finally out.  On the course of last 2 years, I was pretty sure a number of times that it will happen next month the latest, but there always were good reasons to postpone it. Now finally it’s officially out. I think it’s a huge step for PHP. Download it and try it!

Some major new features in 5.3:

1. Namespaces! They didn’t end up exactly as I thought they would but they are a major feature PHP was missing for a long time, and I’m very curious to see how it works out in big projects.
2. Closures and anonymous functions! PHP now has first-class functions, and you can do all kinds of crazy stuff with it. Or just make your code easier to read and maintain
3. Garbage collection. PHP engine, being refcount-based, always has had a slight problem with reference loops. Even though usually it was not a big issue since at the end of the request everything is cleaned up, for long-running PHP applications not based on short request pattern it became a problem. Not anymore – now the engine knows to clean up such loops.
4. Late static binding – it’s somewhat exotic thing for people that never encountered it, but was very burning issue for people that did need it. Basically, when class Foo extends class Bar, and the method func() defined in Foo is called as Bar::func(), there was no way to distinguish it from Foo::func(). Now there is. This allows to implement all kinds of cool patterns like ActiveRecord.
5. Intl extension in core – lots of functions to allow you to internationalize your application.
6. Phar in core – now you can pack all the application in one neat file and still be able to run it!

Also in 5.3:

1. Nowdocs – same as heredocs, but doesn’t parse variables. Excellent feature for somebody that wants to include bing chunk of text into the script which can happen to have $’s etc. in it.
2. ?: shortcut. That’s simple – $a?:$b is $a if $a is true, otherwise it’s $b.
3. goto. Yes, I know. But now we have it too. Deal with it.
4. mysqlnd – native PHP-specific mysql driver.

Last but definitely not least – tons of performance improvements, bug fixes, etc. Download it today!

PHP performance tips from Google

I saw a link on twitter referring to PHP optimization advice from Google. There are a bunch of advices there, some of them are quite sound, if not new – like use latest versions if possible, profile your code, cache whatever can be cached, etc. Some are of doubtful value – like the output buffering one, which could be useful in some situations but do nothing or be worse in others, and if you’re a beginner generally it’s better for you to leave it alone until you’ve solved the real performance problems.

However some of the advices make no sense at best and are potentially harmful at worst. Let’s get to it:

First one: Don’t copy variables for no reason. I don’t know what the author intended to describe there, but PHP engine is refcounting copy-on-write, and there’s absolutely no copying going on when assigning variables as they described it:

$description = strip_tags($_POST['description']);
echo $description;


I don’t know where it comes from but it’s just not so, unless maybe in some prehistoric version of PHP. Which means unless you’re going back to 1997 in a time machine this advice is no good for you.

Next one: Avoid doing SQL queries within a loop. This actually might make sense in some situations, however the code examples they give there is missing one important detail that makes it potentially harmful for beginners (see if you can spot it):

$userData = [];
foreach ($userList as $user) {
$userData[] = '("' . $user['first_name'] . '", "' . $user['last_name'] . '")';
}
$query = 'INSERT INTO users (first_name,last_name) VALUES' . implode(',', $userData);
mysql_query($query);


Please repeat after me – DO NOT INSERT USER DATA INTO SQL WITHOUT SANITIZING IT!
Of course, I can not know that $user was not sanitized. Maybe the intent was that it was. But if you give such example and target beginners, you should say so explicitly, every time! People tend to copy/paste examples, and then you get SQL injection in a government site.

Another thing: most of real-life PHP applications usually do not insert data in bulk, except for some very special scenarios (bulk data imports, etc.) – so actually in most cases one would be better off using PDO and prepared statements. Or some higher-level frameworks which will do it for you. But if you roll your own SQL – sanitize the data! This is much more important than any performance tricks.

Next one: Use single-quotes for long strings. PHP code is parsed and compiled, and any possible difference in speed between parsing “” and ” is really negligible unless you operate with hundreds of megabyte-size strings embedded in your code. If you do so, your quotes probably aren’t where you should start optimizing. And of course, using caching (see below) eliminates this difference altogether.

Next one: Use switch/case instead of if/else. This makes no sense since switch does essentially the same things as if’s do. See for yourself, here is the “if” code:

0       2     A(0) = FETCH_R(C("_POST")) [global]
1       2     A(1) = FETCH_DIM_R(A(0), C("action")) [Standard]
2       2     T(2) = IS_EQUAL(A(1), C("add"))
3       2     JMPZ(T(2), 7)
4       3     INIT_FCALL_BY_NAME(function_table, C("addUser"))
5       3     Au(3) = DO_FCALL_BY_NAME() [0 arguments]
6       4     JMP(16)
7       4     A(4) = FETCH_R(C("_POST")) [global]
8       4     A(5) = FETCH_DIM_R(A(4), C("action")) [Standard]
9       4     T(6) = IS_EQUAL(A(5), C("delete"))
10      4     JMPZ(T(6), 14)
11      5     INIT_FCALL_BY_NAME(function_table, C("deleteUser"))
12      5     Au(7) = DO_FCALL_BY_NAME() [0 arguments]
13      6     JMP(16)
14      7     INIT_FCALL_BY_NAME(function_table, C("defaultAction"))
15      7     Au(8) = DO_FCALL_BY_NAME() [0 arguments]
16      9     RETURN(C(1))
17      9     HANDLE_EXCEPTION()


Here is the “switch” code:

0       2     A(0) = FETCH_R(C("_POST")) [global]
1       2     A(1) = FETCH_DIM_R(A(0), C("action")) [Standard]
2       3     T(2) = CASE(A(1), C("add"))
3       3     JMPZ(T(2), 8 )
4       4     INIT_FCALL_BY_NAME(function_table, C("addUser"))
5       4     Au(3) = DO_FCALL_BY_NAME() [0 arguments]
6       5     BRK(0, C(1))
7       6     JMP(10)
8       6     T(2) = CASE(A(1), C("delete"))
9       6     JMPZ(T(2), 14)
10      7     INIT_FCALL_BY_NAME(function_table, C("deleteUser"))
11      7     Au(4) = DO_FCALL_BY_NAME() [0 arguments]
12      8     BRK(0, C(1))
13      9     JMP(15)
14      9     JMP(19)
15     10     INIT_FCALL_BY_NAME(function_table, C("defaultAction"))
16     10     Au(5) = DO_FCALL_BY_NAME() [0 arguments]
17     11     BRK(0, C(1))
18     12     JMP(20)
19     12     JMP(15)
20     12     SWITCH_FREE(A(1))
21     13     RETURN(C(1))
22     13     HANDLE_EXCEPTION()
No.     CONT    BRK     Parent
0         20          20           -1

You can see there’s a little difference – the latter has CASE/BRK opcodes, which act more or less like IS_EQUAL and JMP, but their plumbing is a bit different, but in general, code is the same (you could even argue “switch” code is a bit less optimal, but that is really the area you shouldn’t be concerned with before you can read and understand the code in zend_vm_def.h – which is not exactly a beginner stuff.

Another thing that the author absolutely failed to mention and which should be one of the very first things anybody who cares about performance should do – is to use a bytecode cache. There are plenty of free ones (shameless plug: Zend Server CE includes one of them – all the performance improvements for $0 and you don’t have to change a bit of code to run it.

Now, I understand Google is not a PHP shop like Yahoo or Facebook or many others. But this article is signed “Eric Higgins, Google Webmaster” and one would expect something much more sound from such source. And in fact there are a lot of blogs and conference talks on the topic and lots of community folks around that I am sure would be ready to help with such article – I wonder why wasn’t it done? Why apparently the best advice we can find from Google is either trivial or useless or wrong?

I think they can do much better, and they should if they take “making the web faster” seriously.

P.S. After having all this written, I also found a comment from Gwynne Raskind, which I advise to read too.

Y-Combinator in PHP

Since PHP 5.3 now has closures, all things that other languages with closures do should also be possible. One of them is having recursive closures. I.e. something like this:

$factorial = function($n) {
   if ($n <= 1)
     return 1;
   else
     return $n * call_user_func(__FUNCTION__, $n - 1);
};

which does not work. One of the ways to do it is to use Y combinator function, which allows, by application of dark magic and friendly spirits from other dimensions, to convert non-recursive code to recursive code. In PHP, Y combinator function would look like this:

function Y($F) {
    $func =  function ($f) { return $f($f); };
    return $func(function ($f) use($F) {
            return $F(function ($x) use($f) {
            $ff = $f($f);
            return $ff($x);
        });
    });
}

And then the factorial function would be:

$factorial = Y(function($fact) {
    return function($n) use($fact) {
        return ($n <= 1)?1:$n*$fact($n-1);
    };
});

Which does work:

var_dump($factorial(6)); ==> int(720)

Of course, we could also cheat and go this way:

$factorial = function($n) use (&$factorial) {
      if ($n <= 1)
        return 1;
      else
        return $n * $factorial($n - 1);
};

Doing Y-combinator in PHP was attempted before (and here), but now I think it works better. It could be even nicer if PHP syntax allowed chaining function invocations – ($foo($bar))($baz) – but for now it doesn’t.

If you wonder, using such techniques does have legitimate applications, though I’m not sure if doing it in PHP this way is worth the trouble.

Zend Server

The product that I (among many others here at Zend) was working on lately – Zend Server - was released today.

Basic version is free (as in “free beer”) and has fastest bytecode-cache that I know of, native RPM/DEB install, debugger and other goodies.  Full version of course is even better.

Seven things

Unusually (for this blog) non-technical post.

Generally I don’t like mass actions, chain letters and stuff like that. That is probably because of my contrarian spirit and general stubbornness  – if many people do it, why I now have to do it? Hell no. But this thing seems to be interesting, so thanks Andi for tagging me. So here go the seven things about me:

1. I speak Russian (my native tongue), English and Hebrew. I understand Ukrainian but probably couldn’t speak it now without making people laugh hysterically, not enough practice. I want to learn Latin (working on it) and Arabic (not working on it). I also studied German for 3 years in school, but when I switched schools I had to study English instead, so I spent summer trying to catch up with 3 years of school program I missed. I overdid it a bit (or maybe the program sucked)  so I could slack off next couple of years in English classes because I already knew all that stuff. I wish I didn’t forget the German in the meantime, but I did, so now I remember just random words and phrases.

2. My first programming experience was the Soviet B3-34 electronic calculator. If you think assembly language programming is hard, try to program this baby. And to think people actually programmed interactive real-time games (albeit requiring a lot of imagination) on it! (Bonus point for guessing how to do game controls without any keyboard inputs, etc.) I didn’t reach that level, but I did some simpler stuff before moving to computers with such luxury as actual multi-line screen (alphanumerical). My first paying job of course involved computers. I can’t imagine what I would do if computers weren’t invented. Probably I would be a linguist.

3. I have absolutely no talent for music, which I discovered the hard way after unsuccessfully trying to learn to play a guitar for a year. Same goes for most of other creative arts (painting, sculpture, design, poetry, etc.) and I severely envy all people that have such talents. I do like the music though, and while as youngster I was of course a rock-music fan, now I increasingly getting to like the classic music. I feel I need much more education in the area before I can really appreciate it though. I rarely listen to music while working, because if I like it it distracts me and if I don’t it it pisses me off.

4. I can’t understand sports. I.e. I get the theory, but why these people are getting so excited is completely beyond me. I can kind of figure out the “nice” sports like figure skating or gymnastics – people doing cool and beautiful and complicated stuff, etc. – but things like football or baseball I don’t get. Why anybody would spend so much time and money on that?

5. A year ago I started to learn Aikido. I think I like it. Got the blue belt (which is very very initial stage) and I hope sometime in the future I’ll be good at it.

6. Once I wrote a letter to leading Soviet’s newspaper for children – Pionerskaya Pravda (Pioneer’s Truth). It was published. I was about 8 or 9 then. I never wrote letters to newspapers since then. Surprisingly, I just learned that the newspaper (unlike the founding Pioneers organization) still exists.

7. I enjoy discussing politics a lot, especially online, and spend way too much time on it (a bit less now, but still). My political conviction is libertarian. I don’t expect to have any political party I would want to vote for to exist in my lifetime.

ZendCon 08 php 5.3

I have uploaded the presentation about PHP 5.3 that we roughly followed on ZendCon PHP 5.3 panel. Enjoy

You may want also look at Ilia Alshanetsky’s one, they are mostly the same but details may vary.

5.3!

The PHP 5.3 release process has officially started with alpha1. Which hopefully means we’d have release in about 2-3 monthes.

This 5.3 release has two huge features that I think will have big influence on the future of PHP – namespaces and closures. There’s also late static binding, which allows to do all kinds of cool tricks, new cool extensions, new faster re2c-based parser, and many other smaller improvements.

Big thanks to everyone who helped to create it, provided feedback, helped with tests, documentation, etc. I think this version will be very successful. And separate thanks to Lukas who made this release from “erm… sometime soon” into “full speed ahead”!

duck operator

Crazy idea for today – operator to check conformance to specific interface without actually implementing it. Why one would want that?
Well, if you are into duck typing style of programming, it may be interesting for you to have an object that implements certain set of functions, but not necessary declares it at class definition. Languages like Smalltalk do it all day along, so why PHP couldn’t? The idea is it looks like this:

interface Cow {
  function moo();
  function eatGrass();
}
/* somewhere else */
class MooingGrassEater {
  function moo() {/*stuff */}
  function eatGrass() {/*stuff */}
  /*stuff */
}
/* somewhere else */
function CowConsumer($classname) {
$foo = new $classname();
if($foo implements Cow) {
  echo "Behold the cow:";
  $foo->eatGrass();
  $foo->moo();
} else {
  echo "$classname is not a cow!";
}

implements here is our duck operator. Note that unlike instanceof, no formal relationship is required, but only practical implementation. So another name would be “common law marriage operator”

Of course, this one would be anathema to “strict OO” camp, so if you subscribe to that, just ignore this post

Two challenges to this idea are:

1. __call() – we have no way to know what __call does. So either we ignore it or say “ok, __call does everything”. I’d go for the latter.
2. Performance. To check duck implementation one basically would have to match method lists, which amounts to number of is_callable calls equal to the number of methods in interface being checked.

Actually, PHP uses this style sometimes – see, for example, user defined streams. But there’s no nice way to work with it from the consumer side.

the secret of PHP

So, another “PHP sucks” post, this time from Jeff Atwood. He actually ends up even kind of praising PHP, surprised by its success. I have a couple of thoughts on that topic too.

First, people really need to stop reading something on PHP written somewhere in 2005 (probably about experiences that happened in 2001) and apply it to PHP as it is now, without even checking around for current trends. It’s as if people would dig up books from middle ages saying that there are only seven metals in existence or debating about phlogiston, and would use it speaking about the modern chemistry. Come on!

Then the next thing apparently wrong with PHP is too many functions. Right. Since when? Since when having a lot of functions is a problem? Does it hurt anybody? Does it make writing PHP code harder? Does it make programmer less successful in achieving his goals?
About keywords I could kind of understand – OK, a lot to remember (though I didn’t see anybody really having trouble to remember such complicated keywords as “while”, “if”, “class” or “public”) and it takes out some good English words that could be used as function/method names to confuse the enemy (who wouldn’t want to have function named endforeach() or static(), not to mention function()? too bad those are not available!). But complaining there’s too many actual functions that allow you to do real useful stuff? That is the thing that is bothering people? That is what scares people away from using the language “for years”?

The next beef with PHP is that people write sucky code on it. No, really, they do? Must be something really wrong with this language. It’s not like people write mind-bogglingly sucky code on every other “good” language on the planet. But I get it. The intent was – PHP makes easy to write sucky code. Yes, this is true. As true as “Porsche 997 makes it easy to drive at 100mph into a brick wall”.  PHP makes it easy to write various kinds of code – and if 90% of code written is sucky, then 90% of PHP code would be sucky. But my experience says quality of the production code almost never has much to do with the language, but only with the culture – organizational and personal, and with choosing right ways to do the job. The rest is just bad statistics in play. Like “I know 7-year-old writing websites, and his PHP code sucks”. I bet his Haskell code rules though

That’s not to say PHP couldn’t use improvement. It could. And it does, actually – and there’s enough room for improvement still, in many areas. But it probably would never satisfy purists. It’s practical. Maybe it doesn’t allow you to write whole programs in one line of uncomprehensible character soup or play with high-level math theory concepts, but it allows people to write web applications. So they do – so where’s the surprise when one morning somebody wakes up and discovers there’s a ton of web applications around and they are written in PHP?

P.S. I wish for every 50 “PHP sucks” blogs people would write one good RFC.

Benchmarking Zend Framework loader

One of the things I am doing in course of my work is performance benchmarks for various stuff – PHP, Zend products, applications, etc. Performance in PHP space is currently like alchemy – there are a lot of rumors floating around about various properties of various stuff, but much less reliable data that can be verified and used. PHP has standard bench.php script, but it covers only a small part of what real-life applications do. I wish there were more established tests and methods for benchmarking PHP engine and applications. But benchmarking is a complicated subject, and variety of PHP platforms and applications makes it harder to create useful general-purpose benchmarks.

But more to the point. On Zend Framework lists there was a topic raised about performance impact of Zend_Loader component, which is used for – no surprise here! – loading classes, including autoloading, etc. Some folks thought that since Zend_Loader is executing some code before actual loading the required file, it must cost something. And it makes sense. However, how much does it cost?
Well, the best way to know the price of something is to ask – and in this case, to run the test. So that’s what I did – I made a list of 725 Framework classes (ZF now has more than 1000 but I composed the list some time ago and had also to drop some to avoid some tricky dependencies). And I wrote two scripts – one that would load these classes with require_once and one that would load them using Zend_Loader::loadClass. Both the data file and the scripts are available for download for those that would like to play with it. I tested them with and without Zend’s bytecode cache, to see how much one can save using bytecode caching technology.

So, the results were as follows:

Without bytecode cache:

          require_once Zend_Loader
php5.2        4.42      4.42
php5.3        4.96      4.97

With bytecode cache:

           require_once Zend_Loader
php5.2        63.04     56.62
php5.3        61.28     55.52

The numbers are requests per second, so more is better. Test run on Linux dual 2GHz AMD.

What we can conclude from these?

1. It is very important to understand that it is a narrow-point benchmark that tests only one function in one specific way. Please do not draw conclusions on behavior of whole applications based only on this benchmark.
2. You do want to use bytecode caching. You won’t get 15x performance on any real application, but it does speed up loading very significantly.
3. Without bytecode caching, it doesn’t matter if you use require_once or Loader – both are equally slow
4. With bytecode caching, Loader has some overhead – explanation for this is that with file accesses eliminated, require_once of course has little left, while Loader still does a couple of function calls. But on real-life apps it’d probably be very small, provided that it’s about 10% even on loading-only huge-class-list benchmark, and your application probably does something useful instead of loading 700+ framework classes ) Meaning, fears of using the class loader vs. doing require_once are seriously overstated.
5. 5.3 is still a moving target, to don’t put too much stake in current benchmark results for 5.3, they probably will be different by the time 5.3 is in release cycle (hopefully, better )

P.S. This post does not talk about other things like “what if I stuff all classes I use into single file”, etc. Maybe next time.