I'm thinking of writing a PHP extension from C, just to improve the speed. strpos() and preg_match() etc. are way too slow for my project.
But it struck me, that strpos() and preg_match() must have been 'originally' written in C or some other primitive language.
So, here my question: Is it meaningful, that I write some extension in C, just in order to improve the computation speed?
It might be useful if you can identify a "self-contained" bottleneck. PHP is still a scripting language. There are a lot of lookup operations, some memory operations which can be optimized away in C, maybe a handle/value/memory block from one of the underlying libraries that you could store/use more efficiently in your specific case, and so on and on.
But, make sure that the code block you're touching is worth the effort. I.e. first identify the bottleneck. Run a php profiler (like e.g. xdebug) and then maybe even a C profiler to see where the time is spent in the php runtime. And keep in mind that if you write the extension it's your job to keep it up to date, running and functional (including bug tracking/fixing, quality assurance, ...).