Looks fairly interesting, I doubt 18% is consistent benefit across the board
I doubt it very much too. While I made that test to strip out non-fcall overhead, I also made it favor the effect being produced by constantly calling the same function from the same scope. Reality isn't like that.
and when unicode overhead is removed is probably less still.
My numbers were based on unicode.semantics=off just FYI...
it does look like a good optimization to make that would certainly make PHP faster then before.
I suspect optimized class fetches will help several cases too:
foo::bar();
foo::baz(foo::BLING);
Just not going to bother working on that unless it sounds worth doing to enough people.
-Sara