we can't get rid of these hacks entirely because BAcKWARdS ComPaTIbilitY, but this at least ensures that things over PID 127 won't burn the house down when 1.12 gets here. This also reduces conflicts with 4.0 line.
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 is cleaner than leaving the player hanging for 5 seconds (which they'll often timeout from anyway). Banning the IP without kicking the player can often look like "lag" and end up getting brushed off as a performance issue.
Previously every thread using the logger had to inherit runtime-defined INI entries in order for the timezone to be set correctly. This removes that requirement.
PhpStorm can't see constructor usages when the class name is dynamic. This causes maintenance problems because cross-referencing constructors called like this doesn't show up dynamic calls.
This allows other threads to notify the main thread to wake it up while it's sleeping between ticks, allowing reduction of processing latency.
Currently only RakLib and the CommandReader threads utilize this, but it's planned to extend it to more things in the near future.
CommandReader is now event-driven instead of poll-based - the server will not poll the CommandReader thread for messages each tick anymore.
RakLib utilizes this mechanism to get packets processed without delays to lower latency.
This now adds an extra dependency - `pocketmine/snooze` library contains the meat of the code used for this. See the Snooze repository for details.
This is completely unnecessary and adds extra complexity for no good reason. Maybe it was used historically, but nowadays it is only used to identify players to send async-prepared batch packets to.
There are two alternative ways to do that:
1. use spl_object_hash() as the targets array in CompressBatchedTask
2. use ServerScheduler's object storage to retain references to the Player[] array.
I've opted for the second method.
Removing these identifiers allows great code simplification in removePlayer() and removes the need for those old stupid hacks.
This also includes a backwards-compatibility break by removing the $identifier parameter of Server->addPlayer().
This occurred if the player happened to be closed during the packet being handled, and then an uncaught exception bubbled up to the RakLibInterface. This resulted in a crash due to trying to get the address of a player who no longer had a network session, in order to block their IP address.
