On his blog today, Richard Thomas provides his story of writing up a PHP extension "quick and dirty" for a gaming applications he's working on.

Its been a while since I last played around with extensions, not since php4 so I scanned through the manual and some only tutorials and threw together this quick and dirty guide to help you get started, again quick and dirty, not a hand holding ends all guide to making an extension, if you don't know some C and php already this is not for you.

He walks through the functionality he needed, the simple compile process of it, and the code that combines the two inputted numbers to calculate the "distance".