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Asymmetric Property Write Performance

php.internals

Holly Schilling

50 days ago

While digging into the code recently, I found a performance penalty for asymmetric property setters that are not public. In testing, I found that `protected` and `private` setters were roughly 4x slower than their `public` counterparts.

Code speaks louder than words, so I drafted a PR that removes the performance penalty. The Summary talks about the implementation details more in depth and how to verify the performance. The change is +226/-65 LOC, so fairly small. It might be worth trying to put this fix into 8.6 yet.

https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/22709

Holly

Holly Schilling

49 days ago

This didn’t get much attention on the list, but Ilija was kind enough to review my Draft PR.

I think this is a good candidate to get into 8.6 yet. I posted a formal RFC for it. I’ll give it a few days for anyone who wants to weigh in on if this should land in 8.6 or wait until the next release.

RFC: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/direction_aware_property_resolution
PR: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/22709

Holly

Ilia Alshanetsky

48 days ago

Looks like a great change, definitely a strong candidate for PHP 8.6
inclusion.

On Sun, Jul 12, 2026 at 7:32 PM Holly Schilling <
holly.a.schilling@outlook.com> wrote:

> While digging into the code recently, I found a performance penalty for
> asymmetric property setters that are not public. In testing, I found that
> `protected` and `private` setters were roughly 4x slower than their
> `public` counterparts.
>
> Code speaks louder than words, so I drafted a PR that removes the
> performance penalty. The Summary talks about the implementation details
> more in depth and how to verify the performance. The change is +226/-65
> LOC, so fairly small. It might be worth trying to put this fix into 8.6 yet.
>
> https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/22709
>
> Holly
>

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