On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 11:21 AM, Julien Pauli <jpauli@php.net> wrote:
>> I noticed this commit
>> <https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/commit/4167d66fcfa81a1c2a1
>> 9e853282fac968d9cd454>
>> recently in HHVM, which makes array_values() return the same array back if
>> it's packed instead of building a copy.
>>
>> My understanding is PHP 7 also has packed arrays like HHVM, and my reading
>> of PHP's array_values() implementation (here
>> <https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/c6982995504b6e21e8a5ade
>> 29cfb16a55196dc43/ext/standard/array.c#L4000>)
>> is that it always creates a copy of the array, even if it's packed.
>>
>> Would this be a worthwhile optimisation to make in PHP as well?
>>
>
> That would be nice if array_values() wouldn't reindex the array.
>
> But it does.
>
> $a = [12=> 'foo', 42 => 'bar']; // packed array
> $b = array_values($a);
>
> $b // [0 => 'foo', 42 => 'bar']; // keys have been changed and are not
> kept from source
>
> So, array_values() must allocate a new array, and fill it in with the
> values of source, because array_values() reindexes the source array from
> key 0 ; whatever was the original array.
>
> Note that the allocation is very light, in PHP 7, we allocate a full buffer
> at once , and not one buffer for each slot. The performance inpact of such
> an allocation is really really tiny.
>
Minor nit: [12=>'foo', 42=>'bar'] is not a packed array.
[0=>'foo', 2=>'bar'] is however, so your primary point stands.
However it should be simple enough to detect when a packed array is
also vector-like (indexed from 0 to n-1) and make this minor
optimization.
-Sara
