at openSUSE, we also have a patch for this issue since a few weeks, as
a vendor unfortunately we have to take care of things that people
here dont want to fix...
http://www.flyspray.org/patches/MOPB-01-abicompatible.patch.bz2
I tested this patch on bench.php - surprisingly, no substantial performance difference. So I guess you could submit it to Derick for inclusion into 4.x tree, if there's no other objections to it. Only thing is that I don't see macros ZVAL_SAFE_REF_ADD and ZVAL_SAFE_REF_SET used anywhere, so probably there's no need for them.
--
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Products Engineer
stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/