This is a peculiarly overengineered system that is used for restricting access to enum members under certain conditions, e.g. to disallow changing specific gamerules in survival.
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.
Something as simple as forgetting the reset() when encoding would cause lots of problems which could go unnoticed. This should be fully backwards-compatible but needs more tests.
* Some Binary cleanup, type-hints and strict types
yes, I know this is very crashy... that's good, because it highlights unexpected behaviour
* added some default values
