The "Property Proxy" extension provides a fairly transparent proxy for internal object properties hidden in custom non-zval implementations.
See the php\PropertyProxy class, for the user-land visible part of the implementation.
This extension is hosted at PECL and can be installed with PEAR's pecl command:
# pecl install propro
Watch out for PECL replicates and pharext packages attached to releases.
git clone github.com:m6w6/ext-propro
cd ext-propro
/path/to/phpize
./configure --with-php-config=/path/to/php-config
make
sudo make install
NOTE: This extension mostly only provides infrastructure for other extensions. See the API docs here.
This is the user-land visible PropertyProxy class.
final class php\PropertyProxy