2020-06-16

What are the top 20 most used php functions by frameworks?

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I deeply question how useful this post is. But I think it make sense to share it and also the code that helped me achieving these numbers. Thank you for your feedback, turns out this list was much cooler than I thought and I'm very happy how it was received.

This post is also a hearbeat, to show you I've been just busy but didn't give up on this project 😉.

Below I show the top 20 most used functions by php frameworks.

You can find the code I used to fetch it in this github repository.

I've collected this data based on their main branches today's state. (2020-06-16)

Edit (2020-06-27): as requested, Yii2 framework has been added and the entire list updated. So all code here relates to their main branches to this date. Alongise, I've decided to also add PHPUnit and WordPress since many of you expressed curiosity on them!

Edit (2020-07-23): magento2 also was requested to join this list, so here it is! Really mind blowing results IMO. It kicked out strpos() from the top five to bring implode() in its place ^^

Feel free to ping me on twitter if you'd like to add another framework here! 😊

Feature request: Top of of the pops!

Since many of you requested, here goes a list of the top 5 functions from the whole list.

I'll skip sprintf() because symfony alone pushes this up to 2_746 and it is kind of unfair.

So the compiled list follows:

I must say I'm very impressed about how often we use is_array() and count(). I tested in some repositories I work with and in some the number of calls to count() is around 3k.

Cool stuff 🤣

Top 20 php functions used by WordPress

Top 20 php functions used by Magento 2

Top 20 php functions used by PHPUnit

Top 20 php functions used by Symfony

Quite interesting to notice that sprintf is the most used one. Probably because of Symfony's coding standards towards throwing exceptions.

Exception and error message strings must be concatenated using sprintf;

Top 20 functions used by Yii2

Top 20 php functions used by Laravel

Top 20 php functions used by Amp

I think is kind of unfair to run this program against Amp or Laminas because they are composed by many different packages at once. So the root repository isn't really fetching all dependencies.

I still find quite cool the difference in nature of function calls here in comparison with other frameworks ^^.

Top 20 php functions used by Cake PHP

Top 20 php functions used by Code Igniter 4