This addresses the slowdown reported in #549. The parser and loader accumulated their results with array_merge inside array_reduce, which made loading O(n²) in the number of entries; both now append to a local array instead. Values that are plain literals, or single or double quoted literals containing no escapes, variables or nested quotes, now skip the token state machine entirely, and a few internal call sites avoid unnecessary closure and option allocations. Loading a 2,000 line file is around 4 times faster on PHP 8.4 and 3.6 times faster on PHP 7.4, scaling is now linear, and behaviour was verified unchanged against the previous implementation across PHP 7.2 to 8.5. The one visible fix is that names consisting only of digits now keep their keys in the array returned by load and parse instead of being renumbered by array_merge, which is covered by a new test.