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This is neat. Looking through it, looks like it makes regular numeric arrays faster as well via the flags.

I wonder if the ->pDataPtr vs ->pData confusion has been resolved.

I'm probably a few years behind, but a lot of my confusion working with hashes has been that pair of void* pointers.

Yes, pData and pDataPtr are no more. They have always been pretty pointless - both could have been dropped even retaining the rest of the previous implementation by using a struct hack layout. In the new implementation they aren't needed because it's specialized to zvals (our 99%-or-so use case).

Nice work. I read deeper into the changeset and I like.

The ->pDataPtr was the one thing behind 90% of the bugs I caused with exts (obviously stuff like the frozen_array hashtable handling was a completely odd-ball case).

I read deeper and found that you also fixed the "void * *" in zend_hash_find(), which is another pain point in the old API - you cannot rely on the compiler type-checking at all.

I no longer work with PHP, but avenge me for the hair I've lost over the IS_REF madness (copy_ctor vs separate_zval) :)

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