Using weak references to improve efficiency

As PHP continues to grow and mature, more and more developers are turning to PHP frameworks to facilitate rapid application development. A necessary by-product of this practice, however, is ever larger and more complex objects occupying memory. Large objects that contain many properties, other objects, or sizeable arrays are often referred to as expensive objects.

Compounding the potential memory issues caused by this trend is the fact that all PHP object assignments are automatically made by reference. Without references, the use of third-party frameworks would become cumbersome in the extreme. When you assign an object by reference, however, the object must remain in memory, in its entirety, until all references are destroyed. Only then, after unsetting or overwriting the object, is it entirely destroyed.

In PHP 7.4, a potential solution to this problem was introduced in the form of weak reference support. PHP 8 expanded upon this...