Not happy with PHP's Int

Few years ago, I used PHP extensively for our core rendering engine…… heh…… I'm kidding…… I used it not for rendering engine;, but for my various personal web projects. And I recently took another look at this language again. I wanted to generate some giant random numbers which cannot be represented with normal 32-bit ints. And this will be stored in MySQL DB.

MySQL supports BIGINT, which is 64-bit, so no problem-o. The real problem is PHP itself. PHP's integer is C-like: it can be either 32- or 64-bit. It depends on which machine the PHP is installed. (I suspect you also have to install 64-bit PHP distribution to use 64-bit integer)

Sure, this is sorta acceptable on C because you can always build two executables and distribute both. However, we are talking about PHP here, which is web-based. Say you make some websites using 64-bit integer on PHP on a 64-bit hosted web server. Then later you decided to move to another web host but the new one is 32-bit PHP… Then you are f**ked. What would you do? Refactor all the code with your own custom 64-bit int class? Zawesome.

The other problem is Random() function in PHP, which accepts only an int as a seed and return an int again. So if you use custom 64-bit int class, you will end up with making two 32-bit random numbers and use one of these as your high 32-bit number. Sure you can still use floating-point numbers on PHP, but don't expect good precision…. uh.. not my taste……

Don't get me wrong. I love PHP. This is definitely my first choice for any web programming language. But, I really think PHP should support BIGINT just like MySQL…