I'd love PHP to have proper primitives for working with binary data / buffers. You still have to use strings for that. Those strings are immutable, so performance will suffer.
In JS, there are pretty decent APIs for that. Just copy them, they work good. There is an extension, but you have to build it from source and doesn't cover all of it.
Same goes for container data types. All you've got is array. No sets, no hashmaps, ordered sets, sorted sets.
Array is just all of this at the same time. There's also an extension for that, but its API is... not optimal. I wonder how much faster some programs could be if the array wasn't used as the universal data type.
If one could use composer to install PHP extensions, that would be awesome. I fiddled around with WASM as a language for universal PHP extensions that can be loaded via composer, but there does not seem to be a lot yet.
Same goes for container data types. All you've got is array. No sets, no hashmaps, ordered sets, sorted sets. Array is just all of this at the same time. There's also an extension for that, but its API is... not optimal. I wonder how much faster some programs could be if the array wasn't used as the universal data type.
If one could use composer to install PHP extensions, that would be awesome. I fiddled around with WASM as a language for universal PHP extensions that can be loaded via composer, but there does not seem to be a lot yet.