Memoizing fibonacci function in php

I’ve created a memoized function of the recursive version of fibonacci. I use this as an example for other kinds of functions that would use memoization. My implementation is bad since if I include it in a library, that means that the global variable is still seen..

This is the original recursive fibonacci function:

function fibonacci($n) {
  if($n > 1) {
    return fibonacci($n-1) + fibonacci($n-2);
  }
  return $n;
}

and I modified it to a memoized version:

$memo = array();
function fibonacciMemo($n) {
  global $memo;
  if(array_key_exists($n, $memo)) {
    return $memo[$n];
  }
  else {
    if($n > 1) {
      $result = fibonacciMemo($n-1) + fibonacciMemo($n-2);
      $memo[$n] = $result;
      return $result;
    }
    return $n;
  }
}

I purposely didn’t use the iterative method in implementing fibonacci. Is there any better ways to memoize fibonacci function in php? Can you suggest me better improvements? I’ve seen func_get_args() and call_user_func_array as another way but I can’t seem to know what is better?

So my main question is: How can I memoize fibonacci function in php properly? or What is the best way in memoizing fibonacci function in php?

Answer

Well, Edd Mann shows an excellent way to implement a memoize function in php in His post

Here is the example code (actually taken from Edd Mann’s post):

$memoize = function($func)
{
    return function() use ($func)
    {
        static $cache = [];

        $args = func_get_args();

        $key = md5(serialize($args));

        if ( ! isset($cache[$key])) {
            $cache[$key] = call_user_func_array($func, $args);
        }

        return $cache[$key];
    };
};

$fibonacci = $memoize(function($n) use (&$fibonacci)
{
    return ($n < 2) ? $n : $fibonacci($n - 1) + $fibonacci($n - 2);
});

Notice that the global definition it’s replaced thanks to function clousure and PHP’s first-class function support.

Other solution:

You can create a class containing as static members: fibonnacciMemo and $memo. Notice that you don’t longer have to use $memo as a global variable, so it won’t give any conflict with other namespaces. Here is the example:

class Fib{
    //$memo and fibonacciMemo are static members
    static $memo = array();
    static function fibonacciMemo($n) {
      if(array_key_exists($n, static::$memo)) {
        return static::$memo[$n];
      }
      else {
        if($n > 1) {
          $result = static::fibonacciMemo($n-1) + static::fibonacciMemo($n-2);
          static::$memo[$n] = $result;
          return $result;
        }
        return $n;
      }
    }
}

//Using the same method by Edd Mann to benchmark 
//the results

$start = microtime(true);
Fib::fibonacciMemo(10);
echo sprintf("%fn", microtime(true) - $start);
//outputs 0.000249

$start = microtime(true);
Fib::fibonacciMemo(10);
echo sprintf("%fn", microtime(true) - $start);
//outputs 0.000016 (now with memoized fibonacci)

//Cleaning $memo
Fib::$memo = array();
$start = microtime(true);
Fib::fibonacciMemo(10);
echo sprintf("%fn", microtime(true) - $start);
//outputs 0.000203 (after 'cleaning' $memo)

Using this, you avoid the use of global and also the problem of cleaning the cache. Althought, $memo is not thread save and the keys stored are no hashed values. Anyways, you can use all the php memoize utilites such as memoize-php