// the find
laruence/yaconf
A PHP Persistent Configurations Container
Yaconf is a PHP C extension that parses INI files at PHP startup and keeps the parsed config resident in memory for the entire process lifetime. The zero-copy reads and process-level persistence make it genuinely faster than parsing files on each request. It's for high-traffic PHP-FPM deployments where config access latency actually shows up in profiles.
Written by laruence (the Yaf author), so it follows the same philosophy of doing one thing at the C level rather than in userland. Zero-copy access means config lookups are essentially pointer dereferences. Section inheritance in INI files is a practical feature that native parse_ini_file() doesn't give you. File change detection via directory mtime polling means you don't need a process restart on every deploy if you set check_delay.
INI is the only supported format — no JSON, YAML, or TOML, which matters if your config has nested structure beyond what INI sections can express. The check_delay reload is coarse: it watches directory mtime, so a race between a worker catching the change and one that hasn't yet is a real operational concern on busy servers. It's a PECL extension, meaning it's another moving part in your Docker/CI build that can break on PHP version upgrades — the README still says 'PHP 7+' and doesn't mention PHP 8.x explicitly even though it works. No typed access: everything comes back as strings or arrays, so you're casting and validating in userland anyway.