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 allows the removal of lots of ugly code, and also exposes lots of similarities with how this update type was handled. This can be further improved in the future to more generically handle cases.
I realized in the process of changing this, that it might actually be simpler to treat to treat scheduled updates and neighbour updates as one and the same. They use the same mechanism for being saved on chunks (TileTicks),
and doing that would make updating only require one queue instead of two.
RedstoneOre: use onActivate() to trigger glowing
this is not technically correct behaviour, but this preserves the current behaviour.
getDrops() should now be overridden only for special cases. There are some non-trivial overrides left that are going to need some extra work to clean up.
- All entity and tile constructors now require a \pocketmine\level\Level instead of a \pocketmine\level\format\Chunk.
- Chunk->getProvider() and Chunk->setProvider() have been removed.
- Chunk::__construct() has had the $provider parameter removed.
- Chunk->unload() has had the unused $save parameter removed.
- ChunkEvents now take a Level parameter instead of going through the Chunk
API bump to 3.0.0-ALPHA4
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)
