Nice work, Jim. >I enjoy spelunking in the history of the project, so I did some digging. It >looks to me like Kris didn't quite get the history correct. Boris did propose >a form of serialization first, but it looks like what became serialize() and >unserialize() came into the project another way. > >https://marc.info/?l=php-general&m=90222513234434&w=2 > >The serialize() and unserialize() functions were first added in PHP 3.0.5 >with that same encoding for strings that you're asking about. Here is the >original proposal for adding the functions from Jani Lehtimäki: > >https://news-web.php.net/php.dev/1444 > >The were originally conceived as var_save() and var_load() and operated on >files, but you can see the file format uses the same string encoding, although >it used single quotes. > >It was committed to CVS by Stig here, but unfortunately the emails to the list >didn't include newly-added files. > >https://news-web.php.net/php.dev/1540
Huh. So the quotes may have just stuck around from eval()-related approaches without being officially discussed. In the grand scheme even if you're wasting 2 bytes for every string that could be a tiny % on average. The format's fascinating because it unmistakably *works*, and binary igbinary/msgpack aside, it's a pretty good byte-stream encoding. If you take Sergey's results it's way faster than JSON, at least when it's PHP doing the unserialization: https://grechin.org/2021/04/06/php-json-encode-vs-serialize-performance-comparison.html — S. -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: https://www.php.net/unsub.php
