it's possible we could clean the path up to detect which plugin caused the crash, but for now I'll be happy to not have them showing up as core crashes ...
some things which were copy pasting PM classes into plugins were causing incorrect detection here. The path cleaning guarantees that all plugin paths will start with "plugins/", so we can use that to check instead.
If a plugin was involved in a crash, we can't safely blame it for the crash, since it might have innocently triggered a core bug. Furthermore, it's difficult to accurately detect plugin causing things like invalid argument crashes.
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 should have been done a long time ago, but we didn't want to cause compatibility problems with CA. Now it enforces version checks, this isn't a problem anymore.
this can happen when eval() is used, and then we get a big blank mess with nothing on it. eval() is a special case that should be handled separately, but for now this is just fixing a bug.
This cleans a lot of mess out of the bootstrap file, and also has the added bonus that threads which do not inherit functions can now get access to them by autoloading Utils.
