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.
* Enchantment: Split enchantment type data from instance data
This commit splits enchantments into (effectively) enchantment TYPES vs enchantment INSTANCES.
When applying an enchantment to an item, it only needs to know 2 things:
1. the enchantment ID (identifier) which is used to identify the TYPE
2. the enchantment LEVEL which is used to modify the enchantment's power IN THIS INSTANCE.
Therefore, the LEVEL is not an immutable property. However, all other properties of the currently-named "Enchantment" class are immutable type properties.
Currently, when applying an enchantment to an item, a copy of the enchantment object is created from the registry, and returned. This copies all of the properties contained by the type, which is obviously sub optimal.
