Avoid loading massive array in memory

[garygreen]

Currently all the countries are loaded in memory whenever you want to do a lookup.

The typical usage of this library (I would argue) is to lookup information about "common" countries.

To avoid loading a massive array in memory, would it be an idea to separate the country information into different files grouped by approximate population size?

So maybe we have 3 groups of population sizes: high, med, low.

First the library will attempt to lookup information from the high population countries, then if nothing found, load + try the med file, etc.

Personally I think grouping the data by population size makes a lot of sense in how the library will be commonly used.

Alternatively, we could have an option to generate a compiled/cached version of "common" countries per-app. So maybe there's a way in this library where we can generate (by command) an optimised lookup table based on the apps commonly-looked up country information.

[alcohol]

This sounds like a blatant premature micro-optimization with no real justification. The whole class once initialized will use roughly 337736 bytes. If you consider the opcache possibilities on top of that, it really is negligent.