You can ask about a question. You can even try to improve the
performance of a function. But at the end of the day unless you can
come up with something that will do what the PHP community at large
expects *and* it is faster it's not going to happen.
How exactly "PHP community at large" supposed to verbalize its expectations, if not through discussion of language features? IMO, by posting statements like the one above you suppress (possible) discussions.
Trust me, the core PHP dev team wants to improve performance just like
you do.
They are human and may miss some possibilities. I do not say that I will necessarily point to those possibilities, but still it is possible. Moreover, developers might not use the language the way I do.
It's just that they also have to do silly little things like
maintain BC. They'll break BC if there's a really, REALLY good reason
why, but most of the time the answer is no.
I did not ask developers to break BC. In fact, I did not ask developers to do anything at all.