To the Collider!

Testo is a new PHP testing framework that lets you benchmark code with a single attribute — no extra tools, no boilerplate. 🤔 The Problem Write a function that calculates the sum of all numbers from $a to $b . For example, if $a = 1 and $b = 5 , the result is 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 15 . The simplest solution that comes to mind: iteratively add $i to $a in a for loop until we reach $b , but that's too obvious. Imagination takes over and you want to solve it with arrays: fill an array with values from $a to $b and pass it to sum() . Comparing the Solutions PHP performs very well in synthetic benchmarks, outpacing Python and all that. With JIT enabled and a few tricks, it can even catch up to C++. We won't be comparing PHP with other languages right now — instead, let's just compare these two approaches against each other. Here's my reasoning: The array solution should be slower than the for loop, since extra resources go into computing hashes for the hash table when creating the array, and