This prevents plugins sending wrong packets at the compiler level (or would, if we had a compiler). It's more robust than a getter for client/server and throwing an exception since a static analysis tool can detect faults created by sending wrong packets from the server. This is also used to deny service to dodgy clients which send wrong packets to the server to attack it.
this is in preparation for clientbound/serverbound packet separation. I did this already on another branch, but the changeset was dependent on a massive refactor to split apart packets and binarystream which i'm still not fully happy with.
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.
@shoghicp, y u do dis... I almost created a sub-packet architecture to deal with this shit :(
This mess really ought to be split into multiple packets. Perhaps the PacketPool can be extended to do that in the future.
this must have been missing for how many years now? thanks @shoghicp
this is why we don't do releases on friday night... in my defence my device had the beta installed...
