Hi!
The discussion was concerning parser performance,
the discussion was concerning overall parser performance, not just edge cases.
so a profile of only parser execution would have been
most relevant.
Indeed, try parsing decent articles with all their template trees.
In my profiling data, parser execution dominates, and
as you can see, its mostly regexp evaluation.
Indeed, because you don't have anything what would invoke callbacks or branching in
the code.
(With "php parser", I was referring to
"zendparse" and
"lex_scan", which doesn't seem to use libpcre. I.e., almost all calls
to libpcre is made from the wikitext parser.)
I usually don't know what "php parser" is, opcode caches have been around
for past decade.
Domas