For performance, the goal is:

• As a minimum, to be competitive with existing solutions (currently looking at symfony and Composer)
• To be 90% competitive with the theoretical optimum. This means, we may accept to be 10% slower than theoretically possible, if this can buy us architectural quality.

Optimize our loops

Both the Symfony UniversalClassLoader and the Composer ClassLoader have a minor performance flaw, if set up with too many namespaces:

For every direct lookup, they loop over the entire array of registered namespaces.

This is part of a series about
X Autoload

Currently the xautoload_ClassFinder_NamespaceOrPrefix does support these registration methods:

This is one part in a rather technical series about
X Autoload

PSR-0 and PEAR

Some time ago, the PHP framework interoperability group, consisting of people from different PHP frameworks, published a standard called PSR-0, with policies about how to namespace a class, and where to put the file the class lives in.