NOTE

This is a fork of the original library by Copernica Marketing Software. Though we should be grateful to them for the generation of this wonderful project, it seems that they have lost interest in it and are not really keeping it updated, having only merged a handful of PRs in the last years and not having updated it for PHP 8.

The aim of this fork is to have a maintained version which incorporates the different PRs that the users might add with fixes and new features and to keep the library updated so that it works with the latest PHP versions. We don't plan to actively develop this library, we will be just adding these updates.

PHP-CPP

The PHP-CPP library is a C++ library for developing PHP extensions. It offers a collection of well documented and easy-to-use classes that can be used and extended to build native extensions for PHP. The full documentation can be found on http://www.php-cpp.com.

Watch out: PHP 7+ only! This library has been updated to work with PHP versions 7.0 and up. If you wish to create extensions for older PHP versions, use the PHP-CPP-LEGACY library instead. The PHP-CPP and PHP-CPP-LEGACY library have (almost) identical API's, so you can easily port extensions for PHP 5.* to PHP 7+ and the other way around.

ABOUT

PHP-CPP is created and maintained by Copernica (www.copernica.com). We write our code mostly in PHP and C++ and needed an effective way to combine these two languages. That's where PHP-CPP comes in. Do you appreciate our work and are you looking for other high quality solutions?

Then check out our other solutions:

• PHP-JS (www.php-js.com)
• Copernica Marketing Suite (www.copernica.com)
• MailerQ MTA (www.mailerq.com)
• Responsive Email web service (www.responsiveemail.com)

The power of PHP-CPP

Unlike regular PHP extensions - which are really hard to implement and require a deep knowledge of the Zend engine and pointer manipulation - extensions built with PHP-CPP are not difficult to develop at all. In fact, the only thing you need to do is write a function in C++, and the PHP-CPP library uses all the power offered by C++11 to convert the parameters and return values from your functions to/and from PHP:

Php::Value hello_world()
{
    return "hello world!";
}

The function above is a native C++ function. With PHP-CPP you can export this function to PHP with only one single C++ method call:

extension.add("hello_world", hello_world);

Working with parameters and return values is just as easy:

Php::Value my_plus(Php::Parameters &params)
{
    return params[0] + params[1];
}

The method call to export the above C++ function:

extension.add<my_plus>("my_plus", {
    Php::ByVal("a", Php::numericType),
    Php::ByVal("b", Php::numericType)
});

The PHP-CPP library ensures that the variables from PHP (which internally are complicated C structures), are automatically converted into integers, passed to your function, and that the return value of your "my_plus" function is also converted back into a PHP variable.

Type conversion between native C/C++ types and PHP variables is handled by PHP-CPP, using features from the C++11 language. It does not matter if your functions accept strings, integers, booleans or other native parameters: PHP-CPP takes care of the conversion. The return value of your function is also transformed by PHP-CPP into PHP.

More complicated structures can be handled by PHP-CPP as well. If you would like to return a nested associative array from your function, you can do so too:

Php::Value get_complex_array()
{
    Php::Value r;
    r["a"] = 123;
    r["b"] = 456;
    r["c"][0] = "nested value";
    r["c"][1] = "example";
    return r;
}

The C++ function above is equivalent to the following function in PHP:

function get_complex_array()
{
    return array(
        "a" => 123,
        "b" => 456,
        "c" => array("nested_value","example")
    );
}

More information and more examples are available on the official website: http://www.php-cpp.com.