Writing Extensions I: Getting Started with PHP and Zend Writing Extensions I: Getting Started with PHP and Zend Extensions Tutorial by Sara Golemon | Monday, February 28, 2005 Introduction What are extensions? Lifecycle Memory allocation Set up the build environment Hello World Build your extension Initial settings (INI) as global values ​​Initial settings (INI) as global values ​​Check (code) integrity What's next? Introduction Since you are reading this tutorial, you may be interested in writing extensions to the PHP language. If it wasn't...well, maybe you didn't know about this interest, you'll find it out by the time we wrap up. This tutorial assumes you have basic familiarity with the PHP language and the language its interpreter is implemented in: C. Let's start by specifying why you want to write a PHP extension. 1. Limited to the level of abstraction of the PHP language itself, it cannot directly access certain libraries or operating system-specific calls. 2. You want to customize the behavior of PHP in some unusual way. 3. You have some existing PHP code, but you know it can be faster, smaller, and consume less memory.​