I'd like to show you my recent work on a jumptable optimization for switches.
https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/1048 <https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/1048> It is a fully transparent optimization of switches, by putting a new ZEND_SWITCH opcode at the top of the switch in case we can build a jumptable, which is the case if the cases are only scalars (no doubles) or evaluate to them at compile-time. Switches tend to be big sometimes with a lot of static (literals or constants usually) cases, which was a comparison for each case, and now just a simple hashtable lookup is needed, which greatly improves performance. In case where the result of the switch can be determined at compile-time, it even replaces the comparisons with a simple ZEND_JMP opcode. In synthetic benchmarks the results are mind blowing, but in practice, benefits mostly are stateful userland parsers (often called with sometimes big switches), where it makes it a few percent faster. (For more concrete numbers see https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/1048#issuecomment-73032647) As the optimization is only done if there are 3 or more cases, the lookup is always faster than the single comparisons. So there's no negative performance impact. It already works, except with opcache where the CFG optimization pass still lacks support. Dmitry or Laruence volunteered to add support for opcache. I'd like to know if there are any technical objections to the PR. If not, they will add opcache support and merge it in. Thanks, Bob
