Nikita Popov has posted the second part of a series looking at how PHP 7 represents values internally. In the first part of the series the focus was on the major change from PHP 5: the zval updates and how they're allocated. This new post gets into more of the details on each of the types and how they're handled.

In the first part of this article, high level changes in the internal value representation between PHP 5 and PHP 7 were discussed. As a reminder, the main difference was that zvals are no longer individually allocated and don’t store a reference count themselves. Simple values like integers or floats can be stored directly in a zval, while complex values are represented using a pointer to a separate structure.

[...] In the following the details of the individual complex types will be discussed and compared to the previous implementation in PHP 5. One of the complex types are references, which were already covered in the previous part. Another type that will not be covered here are resources, because I don’t consider them to be interesting.

He goes through a few of the different types including strings and arrays and then gets into detail on how objects have changed from PHP 5 to PHP7. He also talks about "indirect zvals" (the IS_INDIRECT handling) that points to another zval instance rather than embedding it. Finally, he talks about two other constants, IS_CONSTANT and IN_CONSTANT_AST, and how they're used behind the scenes with some example code to illustrate.

Nikita Popov has a new post, the first part of a series, talking about the internal handling of variables in PHP7 and how it has changed from the current/past methods.

My last article described the improvements to the hashtable implementation that were introduced in PHP 7. This followup will take a look at the new representation of PHP values in general. Due to the amount of material to cover, the article is split in two parts: This part will describe how the zval (Zend value) implementation differs between PHP 5 and PHP 7, and also discuss the implementation of references. The second part will investigate the realization of individual types like strings or objects in more detail.

He starts with an introduction to the "zval" struct type and how it relates to the "zvalue" union. He goes on to talk about reference counting on zvals and some of the reasoning/desire to change how these are handled. Finally, he gets to the zval handling coming in PHP7 and the fundamental change in zval handling - they're no longer "individually heap-allocated and no longer store a refcount themselves". This change has several advantages and including improved refcount handling and less pointers involved in determining the actual value. He includes an example of how this new zval structure is defined in PHP7 compare to the previous version too. The remainder of the post looks at other related issues including memory management, supported types and a major change to how variable references are handled.

The third part of the "PHP source for developers" series has been posted over on Anthony Ferrara's blog today looking at the variables PHP's internals use.

In this third post of the PHP's Source Code for PHP Developers series, we're going to expand on the prior posts to help understand how PHP works internally. In the first post of the series, we looked at how to view PHP's source code, how it's structured as well as some basic C pointers for PHP developers. The second post introduced functions into the mix. This time around, we're going to dive into one of the most useful structures in PHP: variables.

He starts with one of the most important variable types used in PHP's source - the ZVAL. This is one of the keys to PHP's loose typing and can be thought of as "a class with only public properties". He gets into more detail with the properties of this "class" (value, refcount__gc, type and is_ref__gc). Also included is a look at how it's actually used - creating new ones, getting the value of them, converting their types and how the internal PHP functions parse their variables.

There's a lot more covered about variables in the post so if this is interesting stuff to you, be sure to read it all. They've done a great job of explaining one of the more complicated parts of the internals that power PHP.

Derick Rethans is republishing an article series he wrote (originally for php|architect) about the garbage collection that is included with the PHP 5.3 releases. He kicks off the series with this first post introducing internal variable handling.

Before we start with the intricate details of PHP's new GC engine I will explain why it is actually needed. This, combined with an introduction how PHP deals with variables in general is explained in this first part of the column. The second part will cover the solution and some notes on the GC mechanism itself, and the third part covers some implications of the GC mechanism, as well as some benchmarks. But now first on to the introduction.

He introduces the concept of a "zval" - the container PHP uses internally to handle variables (along with its "is_ref" and "refcount" to tell the interpreter if it's a reference or not). He also shows how these relate to the variables you set in your applications as well as a mention of the xdebug_debug_zval function of XDebug to show how it's handled behind the scenes. He also shows how references are handled with accompanying images to show the flow. If you'd like more information on variable handling, Derick points to this article for more detail.