Fabien Potencier c471d2ad58 minor #4976 Speed up traversing nodes with node visitors (nicolas-grekas)
This PR was merged into the 3.x branch.

Discussion
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Speed up traversing nodes with node visitors

`NodeTraverser` walks the whole tree once per node visitor, and it iterated over the children of each node with `foreach ($node as ...)`, which allocates an `ArrayIterator` per node and per visitor. It now reads the children array through a new internal `Node::getNodes()` method. On the Symfony Demo, where six visitors are registered, walking the 21k nodes of its 52 templates takes half the instructions it took, and warming up its Twig cache runs 15% fewer instructions and takes 520ms instead of 566ms.

The traverser doesn't go through `getIterator()` anymore, so a subclass overriding it to hide children from visitors would be bypassed, and one declaring its own `getNodes()` would clash; I found none in Twig, Symfony or UX. Calling `getArrayCopy()` on the iterator returned by `getIterator()` would avoid the new method, but it saves 13% of the traversal instructions instead of 50%: `new \ArrayIterator()` and `getArrayCopy()` both copy the array.

<details>
<summary>Merge-up notes</summary>

To 4.x: the patch applies as is (I ran the 4.x suite with it), the CHANGELOG entry doesn't go to 4.x.

</details>

Commits
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69fefec125 Speed up traversing nodes with node visitors
2026-09-30 22:13:13 +02:00
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