The MyBuilder.com Tech blog has a new post from Edd Mann looking at designing immutable concepts in PHP with "transient mutation".

In a recent project we felt it beneficial to introduce the Money pattern. There are many good resources on this pattern, so I will delegate to those for further definition. We decided that encapsulating this into a immutable value object allowed for a cleaner API and removed the fear of any unexpected mutation bugs. However, we noticed a spike in memory and processor usage when wishing to perform many successive actions on such values i.e. summation.

In such a case, new ‘temporary’ Money objects would be instantiated upon each applied addition. As many of these objects were simply a stepping stone to generating the final result, they were just left for the Garbage collector to clean-up.

The idea of "transients" is something pulled from the Clojure language allowing for the mutation of the immutable object and returning a new immutable one....with with some controls, not free form mutation. He includes showing an example of a "Money" object that implements this concept including a "withMutable" method that handles a callback for the mutation operation.