PHP – Take advantage of language constructs

• Fastest things in PHP are the language constructs.
• They are highly optimized in the interpreter
• Don’t require calling external libraries
• Don’t call a function if there is a language construct. As an example, using a casting operator like (int) $total is much more efficient than using the function intval($foo)
• Function calling generate considerably amount of overhead. Using a language construct avoid
• isset() and unset() are both language constructs, even though they mostly act like functions. However calling them does not generate the function overhead.

Some common language constructs are:

1. echo()
2. empty()
3. isset()
4. unset()
5. eval()
6. exit()
7. die()
8. include()
9. include_once()
10. require()
11. require_once()
12. return