This is better for performance because these then don't need to be reevaluated every time they are called.
When encountering an unqualified function or constant reference, PHP will first try to locate a symbol in the current namespace by that name, and then fall back to the global namespace.
This short-circuits the check, which has substantial performance effects in some cases - in particular, ord(), chr() and strlen() show ~1500x faster calls when they are fully qualified.
However, this doesn't mean that PM is getting a massive amount faster. In real world terms, this translates to about 10-15% performance improvement.
But before anyone gets excited, you should know that the CodeOptimizer in the PreProcessor repo has been applying fully-qualified symbol optimizations to Jenkins builds for years, which is one of the reasons why Jenkins builds have better performance than home-built or source installations.
We're choosing to do this for the sake of future SafePHP integration and also to be able to get rid of the buggy CodeOptimizer, so that phar and source are more consistent.
This change breaks pretty much all API pertaining to synchronous task scheduling.
Significant changes:
- Server->getScheduler() has been removed
- Plugin->getScheduler() has been added - every plugin now has its own scheduler
- Because schedulers are now per-plugin, it is now unnecessary for PluginTask to exist because stopping plugin tasks on plugin disable is as simple as destroying the plugin's scheduler. Therefore PluginTask has now been removed and it is expected for things to now use the base Task class instead.
For the most part, plugins will simply need to change Plugin->getServer()->getScheduler()->... to Plugin->getScheduler()->...
Another highlight is that plugin tasks now no longer have global IDs - they are unique to each scheduler.
