Memory leak in xcache extension of PHP

I recently encountered memory leak while using the xcache extension (version 1.2) with PHP 5.2.6.

The following code confirms the memory leak:

$data = "data";
xcache_set("key",$data);
while(1) {
$a = xcache_get("key");
echo "Memory Usage :".memory_get_usage()."\n";
}

This seems like a known issue and a worksround is suggested by oli at http://xcache.lighttpd.net/ticket/95 . Simply type-cast the data to a string while using xcache_set. The following works without any memory leak:

$data = "data";
xcache_set("key",(string)$data);
while(1) {
$a = xcache_get("key");
echo "Memory Usage :".memory_get_usage()."\n";
}

Don't know the root cause of this issue but the workaround helped.