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.
garbage collection does need to be implemented, but I was looking at this code and found so many fucking bugs I decided it wasn't worth the effort of fixing.
This assumes that the region is properly garbage-collected and packed, but if the file contains uncollected garbage this may not be the case, resulting in a region larger than a gigabyte.
This now removes logging from the level providers (for the most part) and replaces it with exception throws and catches. The implementation using the providers should catch these exceptions if they are thrown.
Check size, check header size, check location table offsets point to valid locations, check for shared offsets, prevent issues with corrupted or junk data
Refactored level\format\generic\GenericChunk -> level\format\Chunk.
Re-added support for async chunk sending
Refactored most Level IO into new namespaces for more organisation
Removed LevelDB loader completely (will be re-added at a later date)
