et al. Can you say 'registry'? Drupal now maintains an internal registry of
all functions or classes in the system, allowing it to lazy-load code files as
needed (reducing the amount of code that must be parsed on each request). The
list of included files is cached per menu callback for subsequent loading by
the menu router. This way, a given page request will have all the code it needs
but little else, minimizing time spent parsing unneeded code.
Dries Buytaert