perf(reflection): mint instances via native reflection and drop redundant casts on hot paths

[lisachenko]

Two independent, behavior-preserving reductions on reflection hot paths. No public API changes.

Note: the PR originally carried a third part (entry-level static helpers used by countPublishedShares()); it was dropped per maintainer review — consumers hold Reflection* objects, entry-level static utilities cut against the framework's model.

A. Stop building full z-engine ReflectionClass instances just to bypass constructors

Inside namespace ZEngine\Reflection the unqualified name ReflectionClass resolves to z-engine's own class, whose constructor runs the native parent::__construct(), a class-table find() and initLowLevelStructures() (four HashTable wrappers) — every bit of it discarded when the instance exists only to serve newInstanceWithoutConstructor().

All ten such sites now use ReflectionClass as NativeReflectionClass, the alias already used by ReflectionClass::fromCData() (src/Reflection/ReflectionClass.php:183) and the src/Type/* wrappers:

• src/Reflection/ReflectionMethod.php — fromCData(), fromHookCData(), fromRawEntry(), fromClosureEntry()
• src/Reflection/ReflectionProperty.php — fromCData(), fromRawEntry()
• src/Reflection/ReflectionClassConstant.php — fromCData(), fromRawEntry()
• src/Reflection/ReflectionFunction.php — fromCData(), fromClosureEntry()

Deliberately left unchanged: src/Reflection/ReflectionMethod.php:152, (new ReflectionClass($boardName))->getMethodTable() — that one genuinely needs the z-engine class, since getMethodTable() only exists once initLowLevelStructures() has run. Every other site was checked the same way.

B. Remove redundant zend_class_entry * casts

Each of these passed an already-typed zend_class_entry * through Core::cast('zend_class_entry *', …), which costs a count() array probe, a caught FFI\Exception, and a type-name lookup per call. The producing expression was checked at every site — all four are pointer struct fields (zend_object.ce, zend_function_common.scope), never a C array needing decay — so the cast is dropped, matching the existing direct form in ReflectionProperty::getDeclaringClass() and ReflectionClassConstant::getDeclaringClass():

• src/Type/ObjectEntry.php:131 — $this->pointer->ce, zend_object.ce is ?zend_class_entry in the stubs
• src/Reflection/ReflectionMethod.php:332 — $this->getCommonPointer()->scope
• src/Reflection/FunctionLikeTrait.php:284 — $entryScope, fed from $this->getCommonPointer()->scope at line 198
• src/Reflection/FunctionBodySwap.php:406 — $entryFunction->getCommonPointer()->scope

No site had to be left in place for array decay.

Merge note

ReflectionMethod::fromHookCData() is also touched by the concurrently-open exception-safety PR #197. The hunks are different and roughly ten lines apart, so a textual proximity conflict is possible but the resolution is trivial in either merge order — keep both edits.

Validation

• vendor/bin/phpstan analyse (level max) — clean, no baseline changes needed (verified via a temporary reportUnmatchedIgnoredErrors: true run on both trees).
• PHP_CS_FIXER_IGNORE_ENV=1 vendor/bin/php-cs-fixer fix — 0 of 296 files changed; --dry-run clean.
• Local tests were not run and could not be: the container runs PHP 8.5.9 while this branch targets PHP 8.4, and AGENTS.md forbids executing z-engine code against a mismatched minor. Validation here is static-only; CI on the 8.4 legs is the real gate.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01RnoZ7wuGepCTzsmFQ5sKxG

[lisachenko]

Drop B. it is against the idea of framework

[lisachenko]

Done — Part B is reverted in 8100b30: the entryIsUserDefined()/entryMethodTable() statics are removed and countPublishedShares() builds ReflectionClass::fromCData() per class again, as before. Parts A and C (native reflector for instance minting, redundant cast removal) are unchanged; the PR description is updated accordingly. The concurrently-running hook-consolidation agent was also told not to reuse those statics.

phpstan (level max) and php-cs-fixer re-verified clean after the revert.

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