One of our recurring jobs at Tideways is to ensure that all of our instrumentation works with the new and upcoming PHP versions. For us, “working” doesn’t just mean that the results are correct, but that your PHP extension is fast, gathering insights for our customers with a minimal performance overhead.

The upcoming PHP 8.4 release will include the brand-new feature “property hooks”, a mechanism to add logic to a class property when read from or written to. One benefit of this feature is that you do not need to protect property access with a private property and public getter/setter methods anymore. You can find out how this feature works in the RFC and other places, but in the spirit of this blog we want to focus solely on the performance implications.