Benchmarking Extendable Object Faces

I've started with crell's results when benchmarking magic. I also used his code snipped to run 2.000.000 iterations. As for crell's results, only the relative comparison is from interest, not the absolute numbers. I benchmarked calling a single function or method, which just prefixes the name of the object, which is to be extended: name; } ?> I've done so, so that the results also take the time to access the object into account. I started with benchmarking a direct function or method call and compared it to call_user_func_array() and to using the reflection API to invoke a function or method. I benchmarked using the reflection API with and without the reflection object creation, e.g. this would be the whole method call using reflection: invokeArgs($element, array('d')); ?> Thus one could instantiate the $method object once and reuse it multiple times. So I benchmarked the second call on its own too.

	Function	Method
Direct call	3,70s	3.17s
Using call_user_func_array()	7.21s	7.82s
Using reflection	11.05s	13.09s
Using reflection, call only	6.04s	6.50s

As you can see the whole reflection call is slower then call_user_func_array(), however the method invocation call only is a bit faster. However to be able to reuse the $method objects multiple times one would have to keep them in memory all the time, requiring a more complicated logic and still - the first invocation would be slower. So I decided that all this trouble isn't worth it for being theoretically a tiny bit faster *if* a method is called very often, so I'm staying with call_user_func_array keeping single usage fast. Ok, so here are the results for using Extendable Object Faces:

	Function Extension	Class Extension
incorporated face	16.36s	16.68s
added face	19.00s	19.44s
added face, $face given	16.45s	16.75s

Update: Separate faces have been removed, the API performs as shown for incorporated faces. Compared to using call_user_func_array() directly the Object Faces are 2,2 to 2,6 times slower. I think this is an acceptable good performance - of course each abstraction makes things slower a little bit. Given the advantages they bring, I think it's very well worth it :).