Php service, PHP 7.2 support

[kalifg]

Background

In the course of my day job, I needed to add base58 support but could not use the bcmath or gmp modules. To support that I wrote a pure PHP service.

To work with our environment I had to make a couple of changes to support PHP 7.2

Deficiencies

I'm aware it has (at least) the following issues:

• Need to separate PHPService updates from PHP 7.2 compatibility updates
• Need to make it PHP 5.3 compatible
  but I wanted to get discussion started so I can avoid repeating any other mistakes I have made

Performance

According to the included benchmarks, on my machine the pure PHP implementation is actually faster than the bcmath implementation:

StephenHill\Benchmarks\Base16Event
    Method Name    Iterations    Average Time      Ops/second
    ------------  ------------  --------------    -------------
    encodeBase16: [10,000    ] [0.0000000098705] [101,311,690.82126]
    decodeBase16: [10,000    ] [0.0000001375437] [7,270,417.75004]


StephenHill\Benchmarks\Base58BCMathEvent
    Method Name    Iterations    Average Time      Ops/second
    ------------  ------------  --------------    -------------
    encodeBase58: [10,000    ] [0.0000283010483] [35,334.38020]
    decodeBase58: [10,000    ] [0.0000288946390] [34,608.49604]


StephenHill\Benchmarks\Base58GMPEvent
    Method Name    Iterations    Average Time      Ops/second
    ------------  ------------  --------------    -------------
    encodeBase58: [10,000    ] [0.0000095309734] [104,921.07725]
    decodeBase58: [10,000    ] [0.0000168622017] [59,304.23668]


StephenHill\Benchmarks\Base58PHPEvent
    Method Name    Iterations    Average Time      Ops/second
    ------------  ------------  --------------    -------------
    encodeBase58: [10,000    ] [0.0000179829836] [55,608.12504]
    decodeBase58: [10,000    ] [0.0000192520618] [51,942.48845]


StephenHill\Benchmarks\Base64Event
    Method Name    Iterations    Average Time      Ops/second
    ------------  ------------  --------------    -------------
    encodeBase64: [10,000    ] [0.0000000110626] [90,394,482.75863]
    decodeBase64: [10,000    ] [0.0000000604630] [16,539,053.62776]

I have an idea that this is at least partially because I do a direct base change from 256 to 58, while the included services do 256->10->58 instead. I envision experimenting with altering the bcmath and gmp algorithms similarly to see if they also speed up.

[stephen-hill]

Hi Michael

Thank you very much. This is awesome and very much appreciated.

I'll go over the code over the next couple of weeks - hopefully this weekend.

I'm very much up for going ahead with a v2.0 release which has a minimum PHP version requirement of 7.x (which version exactly, I'm happy to discuss). There are many good reasons to do this.

I will, however, cherry pick b2d6dc1 into the v1.1 branch, event though it isn't a PHP 5.x problem, it makes sense to me.

Anyway, great work, and I'll be back in touch soon.

Cheers
Stephen