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 was observed in a recent crashdump where a plugin triggered a recursion error, but the stack trace did not contain any sign of a recursive event call. I conclude that this must have been caused by previous event handlers triggering errors 50 times in order to make the recursion detection break, because the recursion detection did not decrement the counter in cases where an exception was thrown.
This check is completely unnecessary since handlers get unregistered when a plugin is disabled. Additionally, this is an extremely hot path and this change produces a modest 5% performance improvement to event calls.
This is dependent on the changes made in b1e0f82cbf. This now makes it possible to call events without fetching a Server reference, allowing to eliminate a vast array of Server dependencies.
* Event handlers always handle subclass events. public static $handlerList no longer required.
* Removed $handlerList declarations
* HandlerList cleanup: Removed HandlerList->handlers and related bake methods
* Removed obsolete Event->getHandlers()
* EventPriority: Added fromString()
* PluginManager: throw exceptions on registering handlers with invalid priorities
This allows specifying a handler of `EntityDamageEvent` which will handle any instanceof it (as per current behaviour), AND also now allows specifying a handler specifically for `EntityDamageByEntityEvent`, which only handles `EntityDamageEvent`.
This was not previously possible due to limitations in the way handlers were registered.
Abstract events may not be handled unless they declare the `@allowHandle` PhpDoc tag.