// Before
$payload = json_encode($response);
$data = json_decode($input, true);
$ok = json_validate($input);
// After
$payload = fastjson_encode($response);
$data = fastjson_decode($input, true);
$ok = fastjson_validate($input);
That's the migration. Search-and-replace json_* for fastjson_*. JSON flags, error constants, and last-error semantics carry across byte-for-byte. The two extensions sit next to each other in the same process; adoption is per call site, not per repo.
On the simdjson_php canonical 14.8 MB corpus, that swap buys 6.06× encode throughput, 2.66× decode, and 5.10× validate against ext/json on the same PHP 8.6.0-dev build. The repo is at github.com/iliaal/fastjson. 0.3.0 shipped yesterday.
Why drop in faster JSON for PHP
ext/json is fine. It's correct, well-maintained, and tracks the spec. On low-traffic endpoints it isn't on anyone's profiler. The cost shows up at scale: any application that calls json_encode and json_decode on every request path eventua...
(new FastChart\StockChart())
->setSize(1200, 600)
->setTitle('AAPL last 90 days')
->setTheme(FastChart\Chart::THEME_DARK)
->setOhlcv($ohlcvRows)
->setMovingAverages([20, 50, 200])
->setVolumePane(true)
->setCandleStyle(FastChart\Chart::STYLE_HOLLOW)
->renderToFile('/tmp/aapl.png');
That's a server-side OHLCV candlestick chart with three moving averages, a volume pane, and a hollow candle style. Roughly 68 ms on a single core at 1920×1080. No microservice, no Node sidecar, no JavaScript runtime. PHP, gd, fastchart.
fastchart 0.2.0 shipped two days ago. 19 chart types behind a fluent OO API, plus a Symbol family (Code 128 barcodes and QR codes) that landed in this release. The repo is at github.com/iliaal/fastchart.
Why charts in PHP again
Twenty years ago, Rasmus and I shipped the initial release of PECL/GDChart in January 2006. It wrapped Bruce Verderaime's gdchart C library from users.fred.net/brv/chart/. The PECL page is still up at https://pecl.php.net/package/GD...
The launch post for php_clickhouse 0.6.0 covered the framing: native binary protocol, soft fork of the stalled SeasClick, modern ClickHouse types, 30-40% faster than HTTP at high throughput. That post landed April 25, 2026. Today (May 1, 2026) the current tag is 0.8.1, and I'm calling the extension stable.
The six days in between were a focused quality cycle, not a feature sprint. Three buckets:
Performance. Insert and write paths build native ClickHouse columns one at a time directly from row-major input. Peak intermediate PHP memory dropped from N_rows × N_cols zvals to one column.
Security. Strict full-consumption parsers across Map, narrow-int, Int128 / UInt128, geo, DateTime64, Time64, hex literals, and typed parameters. Wrong-type input throws instead of corrupting memory or coercing silently to zero. Recursive type-conversion gained a depth cap so adversarial server schemas can't blow the stack.
Stability. Per-Client state moved from file-scope std::map banks onto the zend_object...
Guide to PHP Security
