? Nobody is talking about sessions here, just about the serialize()
You mean you are not talking about sessions. I, however, do. Sessions are one of the obvious examples where such functionality could improve performance.
function that is also used for a myriad of other things...
Oh really? I guess that's why we talk about _adding_ stuff to it in order to make it more efficient *in certain scenarios* and not replacing it with the new one. Precisely the scenarios where external locking would be happening anyway - when either using sessions or caching.
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Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Products Engineer
stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/