Question about COM objects for PHP4

Hello! I've been working for a couple of years with M$ IIS 4.0 and ASP, and also written some COM objects that can be used from ASP pages. Since this could improve performance, as well as make it easier to do some stuff, I wonder if PHP4 (or later versions) might get some kind of interface to load shared libraries and execute code in them, just like COM objects. I've checked the PHP FAQ as well as scanned the mailinglist archive without finding anything that looks like that. From what I gathered from what I've read of the documentation, you can add shared libs to PHP, but isn't that at compile time? What I'd like to do is for PHP to load the lib at runtime, even if it doesn't know what functions the lib contains (something like an interface to get all functions, parameters etc, and make them callable from PHP scripts). -- mvh Mathias Axelsson