http://blog.patshead.com/2011/04/improve-your-oh-my-zsh-star...
Here's the exact pull request for that commit, with quite a bit of discussion about why it's faster and why it was done the "wrong" way before:
https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/pull/269
Hope that helps anyone else who was curious about exactly what was changed!