Tech Ramblings

If you're writing a PHP extension that must call php functions by users, there is a special case that is not well documented that you should be aware of.

If the function you call to encounters a fatal error in PHP-land, execution will never return to your extension.

You'll leak memory and valgrind will pick up on that and everything will be terrible and blah, blah, blah.

The good news? If PHP encounters a fatal error (i.e. Fatal error: Call to undefined function ifsetor()), PHP immediately will try to exit after logging the error, or execute a user-provided shutdown function if one is registered, then exit. So you don't really need to worry about the memory leak. The OS should clean it up once the PHP process exits.