If you switch some of the letters of July around you end up with Leviy.

Okay, maybe not quite. But it's close! Come join us at Leviy's office and let's talk PHP internals.

18:30 Food! - sponsored by Leviy
19:00 Welcome
19:30 Nash van Gool - Into the abyss: low-level programming for high-level programmers
21:00 Closing and raffle
21:10 Social & Drinks

Into the abyss: low-level programming for high-level programmers

We've all heard the terms: high-level and low-level languages. Surprisingly perhaps, they have nothing to do with how difficult a language is - rather, a low-level language is "closer to the hardware", requiring a lot of manual action, whereas high-level languages hide a lot of these concerns from the programmer, allowing focus on more functional concerns. From garbage collection to dynamic typing, PHP has a lot of abstractions in place to make your life that little bit easier. However, the risk is that we, as developers, lose a sense of what is happening in the background.

This talk goes into some of the lower-level details of what PHP does for you. We'll go into memory management and why garbage collection is such a complicated thing to do, data representations and why they matter, how arrays and variables work (and why they take so much memory!), and some of what PHP has to do in the background to make it all work. We're not going to explore the PHP core in-depth, but some implementation details will be covered as they become relevant.

Knowing these details is by no means crucial to being able to develop in PHP, but will allow you to reason about your code on a different level. You'll walk away from this talk understanding how and why type hints impact performance, why repeated string concatenations are so inefficient, and why arrays in PHP are actually very strange. And with the coming of PHP7.4 and the Foreign Function Interface, maybe you'll have a sense of where PHP's limits are, and how writing low-level code may be able to solve a different set of problems, or cause new ones you never expected.