As Denis-de-Bernardy mentioned in the Trac ticket core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10264, get_class does not deal with inheritance as is_a and instanceof do. To get the same functionality using get_class, is_subclass_of must also be used in the conditional test.
Because there was no appreciable difference between testing with error reporting on or off is_a instanceof and get_class, I simplified the testing by eliminating the error reporting on block. I created another emptyClass that extended the original emptyClass. I retained the is_a and instanceof tests, as well as the get_class test. But I also added an is_subclass_of test and a combined get_class or is_subclass_of test. The times shown are still for 4400000 (4 million 400 thousand) iterations. I ran two variations, the first to test if the $object 'parent-class' had the $class_name 'parent-class', and the second to test if the $object 'subclass' had the $class_name 'parent-class'.
As can be seen, using either get_class or is_subclass_of alone does not produce the correct results as an object can only be either the class or a subclass of the class, not both at the same time.
As compared to the previous test runs, is_a, instanceof and get_class had similar run times. When the $object was the 'parent-class' and had the $class_name 'parent-class', PHP had no need to test for is_subclass_of and so the run time was only a bit slower than get_class alone, being similar to the instanceof run time. But when the $object was the 'subclass' and had the $class_name 'parent-class', the run time was longer. Slower than instanceof, but still considerably faster than is_a.
$object 'parent-class', $class_name 'parent-class'
isa: true isa_off_run_time: 104.030926943 isa: true isa_off_run_time: 101.787961006 isa: true isa_off_run_time: 100.796969891 iof: true iof_off_run_time: 36.4872579575 iof: true iof_off_run_time: 36.2819008827 iof: true iof_off_run_time: 35.8666028976 gc: true gc_off_run_time: 33.9882059097 gc: true gc_off_run_time: 33.8179419041 gc: true gc_off_run_time: 33.9171960354 iso: false iso_off_run_time: 47.4339499474 iso: false iso_off_run_time: 47.8175148964 iso: false iso_off_run_time: 47.2504739761 gciso: true gciso_off_run_time: 35.2629709244 gciso: true gciso_off_run_time: 35.8787820339 gciso: true gciso_off_run_time: 34.9580559731
$object 'subclass', $class_name 'parent-class'
isa: true isa_off_run_time: 102.17751193 isa: true isa_off_run_time: 101.644783974 isa: true isa_off_run_time: 102.215440989 iof: true iof_off_run_time: 36.0798051357 iof: true iof_off_run_time: 35.9090869427 iof: true iof_off_run_time: 36.0413579941 gc: false gc_off_run_time: 33.3235809803 gc: false gc_off_run_time: 33.2563240528 gc: false gc_off_run_time: 33.2467691898 iso: true iso_off_run_time: 48.7431797981 iso: true iso_off_run_time: 48.9224038124 iso: true iso_off_run_time: 48.5773239136 gciso: true gciso_off_run_time: 78.766422987 gciso: true gciso_off_run_time: 79.0953769684 gciso: true gciso_off_run_time: 79.1366560459
Although using a combined get_class or is_subclass_of in place of is_a results in more-or-less improved performance, the conditional is not as readable. My primary reason for the code substitution is to eliminate the E_STRICT deprecated errors from my error logs without using the instanceof operator and the problems it's use might introduce.
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