PHP 4 OOP Question

-_-PHP-_-

Hi,

I'm building my client website using OOP in PHP4 and I have a question.
How much memory can I save by using reference technique (&) for assigning, passing, and returning objects?

Here is a nice article that I found.

http://www.obdev.at/developers/articles/00002.html

(By the way, PHP4 is not my choice, but my client's.)

Could you please share your experience and knowledge?

Thank you!

--PHP--

-_-PHP-_-

I just thought that not only objects but also variables are copied in PHP4, so if you have a Log class that only outputs a message to a log file, doesn't it make sense to pass the message (string) by reference so that unnecessary copy is not made??

class Log
{
    // this copies $message
    function log($message)
    {
        error_log($message);
    }
}

// "log me" is copied by method log()
Log::log("log me");

so shouldn't it be like

class Log
{
    // this does not copy $message
    function log(& $message)
    {
        error_log($message);
    }
}

// "log me" is passed by reference, not making a copy, saving memory usage???
Log::log("log me");

Does this make sense or is it even a correct approach?? I'm sure a lot of people "log" messages to a log file using their own Log class, so I'm guessing there are tons of copies made when messages are logged and eating up a lot of memory space doing that??

This applies to not only logging, but also many methods and functions.... I've been thinking about this too much... starting to get too confused...

jazz_snob

My take on this:
1. don't worry about optimizing, esp not early in development
2. I wouldn't worry about passing by ref to save memory, ever (at least I haven't to date)

Good discussion:
http://www.obdev.at/developers/articles/00002.html

and of course:
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/language.references.php

-_-PHP-_-

Hi jazz,

Thanks for your reply.

For 2, I found a good article at Zend.

http://www.zend.com/zend/art/ref-count.php#reference

This answered my second question.