It is not much worse than using it in javascript. People do this in js because it saves a few keystrokes and its faster, not that it matters. Its a small thing. Its dirtier, for sure.<p>I just tested it in PHP and it seems it is 20% faster in PHP compared to casting to int. Maybe someone out there will have a weird use case for that, or someone doesn&#x27;t want to put more effort into writing code into terminal and doesn&#x27;t care about his code being unreadable. I think its useful to know it exists.<p>Btw, do you or someone else know why its faster in php too? Its a bitwise operation and I assume under the hood its casting to int, its weird to have it faster than casting it to int, why does this happen? It makes sense in javascript to that its faster than functions, but why it is faster than a cast in PHP?