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 a significant breaking change for anything utilizing Tiles as they now do not store their NBT at runtime anymore.
This is another step in the process of ridding PocketMine-MP of runtime NBT.
It can be noticed that all tiles are now using class fields to store properties instead of NBT, which is much faster, uses less memory and is also more concise when written in code.
Highlights:
- Tile->namedtag has been removed.
- Tile->saveNBT() now accepts a CompoundTag() parameter. Typically it's expected that this will be fed a newly-created CompoundTag (this part may be improved in the future).
- New internal methods Tile->readSaveData() and Tile->writeSaveData() have been added. Instead of overriding __construct() and saveNBT() to load and save properties from NBT, you should now implement these methods instead.
This is not final and will see further changes before it's done.
