Blog Post

by Maarten Manders

preg_match_all('/hand/', 'Talk to the hand!', $result = array()));

require('smartloader.php');
SmartLoader::addIncludeDir(dirname(__FILE__).'/../'); /* (or just the document root) */

This post has 16 responses so far

1. moraes Says:
   April 7th, 2006 at 1:01 pm

   I have been using it for a while and it is very useful. The biggest annoyance is when a class is not found - in a big system, sometimes you don’t know *where* it was called.

    
2. Alan Knowles Says:
   April 7th, 2006 at 7:45 pm

   haha - you’ve re-invented include_path ;)

   no more wondering where a file is included from, you just have to read the mind of the author and hope he hasnt hidden away the SmartLoader call in some obscure include file.

    
3. auricle Says:
   April 7th, 2006 at 10:05 pm

   > the most remarkable bug

   In case anyone was wondering, this does work:
   class Test { function __construct($a) { print_r($a); } } $test = new Test($a = array('hello'));

    
4. Ben Says:
   April 9th, 2006 at 3:19 am

   Why not replace the $GLOBALS[] usage with a static property as it should be private to the class.

    
5. benpjohnson Says:
   April 9th, 2006 at 3:32 am

   Also it might be good to use the for loop instead of foreach as I remember it being *much* faster in the PHP benchmark I read somewhere…

   $size=sizeof($something)

   for($i=0; $i

    
6. Maarten Manders Says:
   April 9th, 2006 at 6:45 am

   haha—you’ve re-invented include_path ;)

   Great, isn’t it? Let’s call it include_path on crack! ;)

   Why not replace the $GLOBALS[] usage with a static property as it should be private to the class.

   I can’t put it into SmartLoader itself because it is defined somewhere else and I can’t define a class (or parts of it) twice. I could put it into some SmartLoaderIndex::index variable but that’s just another (and fashionable) way to make it global.

   Also it might be good to use the for loop instead of foreach as I remember it being *much* faster in the PHP benchmark I read somewhere…

   For-loops are about 3 times faster, that’s correct. But don’t make the mistake to write something like this:

   for($i=0; $i<sizeof($array); $i++)

   The sizeof function would be executed for every iteration, which makes a loop about 10x slower than a foreach.

   However, there are no performance-critical loops in SmartLoader. Most of the time (while indexing, which happens once per software revision!) is being used for preg_match_all (I could try to improve the pattern’s performance) and PHP function calls (which are horribly slow). You can’t use for-loops on associative arrays, either.

    
7. mwolfe Says:
   April 12th, 2006 at 12:42 am

   and then there is the obvious performance booster:
   $total = sizeof($array);
   for($i=0; $i

    
8. mwolfe Says:
   April 12th, 2006 at 12:44 am

   sorry
   $total = sizeof($array); for($i=0; $i

    
9. mrsmiley Says:
   April 13th, 2006 at 12:40 am

   The sizeof function would be executed for every iteration, which makes a loop about 10x slower than a foreach.

   I hope this isn’t the case. I used to think that until I ran some tests a while back and it’s only executed on the first iteration. My test was something like

   $test = array(…..);
   for ($i=0; $i”prior” to adding more elements inside it.

   I believe you only experience said effect while using something like while() and each().

    
10. Maarten Manders Says:
    April 13th, 2006 at 6:27 am

    mrsmiley, you can easily check that with the following code (or just XDebug/Cachegrind):

    
    for($i = 0; test() && $i < 5; $i++) { /* ... */ }
    
    function test() {
    	echo 'Test!
    ';
    	return true;
    }
    
    

     
11. kyberfabrikken Says:
    April 19th, 2006 at 9:50 pm

    An optimizer might be able fix the loop, but vanilla PHP doesn’t have an optimizer. I always write for-loops as this to be sure :
    for ($i=0, $l=count($a); $i < $l; ++$i) { }
    Using ++$i rather than $i++ also saves an internal buffer.

     
12. Mincer Says:
    May 25th, 2006 at 1:43 am

    Maarten,

    I found a little ‘quirk’ in the regex pattern, in that it matches commented code.

    Not only would this be an issue if it thought it could find a class that had been commented out, but also you could inadvertantly overwrite the location of a real class in the index file while writing examples in another file that was scanned elsewhere in the indexing process.

    E.g.

    File 1:

    [code]/**
    * FooBar class
    *
    * Not bothered what I write here, as it’s a comment…
    *
    * Example Usage:
    *
    * class MyClass extends FooBar {}
    *
    */
    [/code]

    File 2:

    [code]class MyClass
    {
    $foo = bar;
    }[/code]

    The index thinks the class can be found in File 1, rather than File 2.

    Matt.

     
13. Mincer Says:
    May 25th, 2006 at 1:45 am

    Oops, let’s try that again….

    (why no preview for comments???)

    Maarten,

    I found a little ‘quirk’ in the regex pattern, in that it matches commented code.

    Not only would this be an issue if it thought it could find a class that had been commented out, but also you could inadvertantly overwrite the location of a real class in the index file while writing examples in another file that was scanned elsewhere in the indexing process.

    E.g.

    File 1:

    /** * FooBar class * * Not bothered what I write here, as it’s a comment… * * Example Usage: * * class MyClass extends FooBar {} * */

    File 2:

    class MyClass { $foo = bar; }

    The index thinks the class can be found in File 1, rather than File 2.

    Matt.

     
14. michel Says:
    September 29th, 2006 at 1:04 am

    Probably extremely late to the party…

    Mincer:
    > I found a little ‘quirk’ in the regex pattern,
    > in that it matches commented code.

    My concern as well, though it’s easily fixed with a little token_get_all(), T_CLASS and T_INTERFACE.

     
15. Jann Says:
    October 1st, 2007 at 7:27 pm

    Hmm, the download link ist not available anymore, can i get the smartloader update elsewhere?

     
16. Christiaan Says:
    December 22nd, 2007 at 1:21 am

    Download link still ain’t available, I also would like to try out this new version. Especially since you’ve mentioned the DIRECTORY_SEPERATOR, which probably was why it wasn’t working for me before on Windows.

     

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