Dmitry Mamontov has posted a the first part of a series looking at manipulating arrays in the PHP source and enhancing performance for certain handing as a PHP extension.

In PHP projects, arrays are used every where because they are useful and flexible to store all sorts of data structures. However, when you need to maximize the performance the manipulation of arrays for specific purposes, you can achieve great gains if you implement a PHP extension written in the C language. Read this tutorial to learn how to build your own basic array manipulation extension in C.

He covers all the steps you'll need to get start building the extension, introduces a few key concepts and starts on the code for the extension:

• Building PHP from the Source
• Building a PHP Extension (overview)
• Brief Introduction to zval and Functions
• Defining a Class in Our Extension
• D for Dynamic (working with dynamic array values)

The C code needed is included through out the post. The next part in the series will build on this and show how to implement interfaces like ArrayAccess and Traversable.