The patch mainly improves not the parser, but generated code.
It builds near optimal ZEND_ADD_STRING, ZEND_ADD_VAR sequence for quoted
strings and heredoc.
OK, I understand that, the question is can we see any difference? We are doing quite major overhaul of the parser, so there should be a reason for it - like the code gets to be that and that faster, etc. Is there a way to see it?
You can see a small difference even on Zend/bench.php.
Actually I don't :) Not beyond the margin of error at least. I'm not very surprised since bench.php doesn't do much with interpolated strings as I see - but I would like to verify that this patch is really a "major optimization" ;)
--
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Products Engineer
stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/