Test: (bool) vs. !empty

According to the documentation, empty is like isset and a reverse bool cast. Perhaps together, those are faster than the cost of the ! on empty?

View test history (1) Run this test again Return to test menu

Result: Discarded

The test labeled "(bool)" was the faster by 0.0541 seconds, (9.538% faster)

(bool) 100%

!empty() 90.462%

The (bool) test took 0.5129 seconds.
The !empty() test took 0.567 seconds.

Nitty-Gritty

Each test case ran 20 random code order iterations consisting of 139,160 loops for a total of 2,783,200 runs.

Line execution difference (0.000019) milliseconds.
Avg difference (2.704) milliseconds per 139,160 loops.
Total difference 54.08 milliseconds for 2,783,200 loops

The iteration variablity for Code 1 was (1.6743) milliseconds and Code 2 was (4.2397) milliseconds. The lower and the closer together there values are the more accurate the results are.

Code

The first test, "(bool)", was:

for ($j = 0; $j < 1000; $j++)
{
	$i = '1';
	$GLOBALS['dummy'] = isset($i) && (bool) $i;
}

The second test, "!empty()", was:

for ($j = 0; $j < 1000; $j++)
{
	$i = '1';
	$GLOBALS['dummy'] = !empty($i);
}

PHP Benchmarks