A lot of the overhead in there is the call to the function json_decode. Function calls are much more expensive than operators in PHP. So this really isn't appl

A lot of the overhead in there is the call to the function json_decode. Function calls are much more expensive than operators in PHP. So this really isn't apples-to-apples. The differences in data structures between the two languages may also play a significant role, what with PHP using complex z-val structs behind the scenes for almost all data types.