[troels]

Technically, yes. What I was referring to was more mundane though. The difference between writing a parser/interpreter partially in PHP or minimizing the php code to a loop and then push all the hard stuff down to preg is significant. Optimizing it further is probably futile, compared to what else goes on in a typical http req-res cycle.

It's a red herring anyway, so I sort of regret bringing it up. Much more important is the other point - that this is a standard tool, rather than a tailored one.