It's about 3-4x faster with the initial implementation: foreach(range(1,20) as $j) foreach(range(1,1000000) as $i) strval($i); Running

It's about 3-4x faster with the initial implementation: foreach(range(1,20) as $j) foreach(range(1,1000000) as $i) strval($i); Running on my low-end EC2 box: php7.3 py.php == 1.258s python2 py.py == 3.714s python3 py.py == 4.530s