Attributes PHP Extension Skill

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Guidelines, tools and resources for building safe, reliable PHP C extensions. Provides best practices for memory management, error handling, and testing.

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Why This Skill?

Writing PHP C extensions is powerful but unforgiving. One wrong reference count and your PHP process crashes. This skill gives you the guardrails to build extensions that work reliably across PHP versions.

The 8 Rules of Safe PHP Extensions

These are the core principles that prevent segfaults, memory leaks, and version incompatibilities:

#	Rule	Why It Matters
A	Test-Driven Development	Write tests before implementing; rely on PHPT and PestPHP
B	Avoid _ functions	Internal APIs change without notice
C	Always use generated arginfo	Manual arginfo is error-prone and hard to maintain
D	Respect reference counting	The Golden Rule of PHP memory management
E	Use PHP error handling	php_error_docref(), zend_throw_exception(), not assert()
F	Use TSRM for shared state	Thread-safe globals when needed
G	Check version compatibility	PHP 7, 8.0, 8.1+ all behave differently
H	Consult reliable resources	PHP internals behavior is non-obvious

See SKILL.md for the full guidelines.

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System Requirements

• Cross-Platform: Works on Linux, macOS, Windows (Git Bash/WSL/PowerShell)
• PHP Versions: Supports PHP 8.5 and all previous versions
• Dependencies: Git, standard C development tools

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Attributes PHP extension skill was created by André Gil and is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.