Properly working with binary data

Hello! I'm currently trying to process binary data. I basically need something like an ArrayBuffer in JavaScript [1] as well as typed arrays [2] to read/write data and something like a DataView [3] with support for endianess conversion. The best approaches I know is to work with strings as a byte buffer as well as pack/unpack. This gets slow if I want to write a Uint32 or some other data type at random positions. This is why I think that there must be some native extension for this (or an entirely different approach). The current use case for my application also has a JS-based binary parser. It could be translated to some PHP equivalent: ```php // object backing the native array buffer $buffer = new ArrayBuffer(4); // 4 bytes // view on the array buffer (with write-access) $view = new DataView($buffer); // writing an int16 (2 bytes) at offset 0 $view->setInt16(0 /* byteOffset */, 256 /* value */, true /* littleEndian */); // accessing the buffer on a byte-basis $byteArray = new Uint8Array($buffer); $byteArray[0]; // 0 $byteArray[1]; // 1 $byteArray[2]; // 0 $byteArray[3]; // 0 // accessing the buffer on a 16-bit basis $int16Array = new Int16Array($buffer); $int16Array[0]; // 256 $int16Array[1]; // 0 $int16Array[1] = 42; $byteArray[0]; // 0 $byteArray[1]; // 1 $byteArray[2]; // 42 $byteArray[3]; // 0 $binaryData = $buffer->getBinaryString(); // traditional PHP string to work with ``` In some other use-case I tried implementing a BitSet/BitArray and used a string array as well as GMP as backing buffers [4]. It turned out that the first approach is pretty inefficient and while GMP is fast for most operations, it is not reliable/consistent to ex/import binary buffers. This is not surprising to me, since GMP doesn't seem to be indented for binary data processing. Is there something to handle this in a performant manner? If not, this would also make a good candidate for a PHP extension (or even a built-in extension). Mimicking the API of JS could be a viable option. Regards, Niklas [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/ArrayBuffer [2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/TypedArray [3]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/DataView [4]: https://github.com/nikeee/php-bit-array