This will be a matter of micro or nano seconds, considering compiler optimizations http://lxr.php.net/xref/PHP_5_5/Zend/zend_API.c#1757

And this extension will never happen to be on production servers :-p

I left those functions so that when I'll need them (in the future, probably), I won't have to rewrite them. They come from the skeleton generator as well.