we can't get rid of these hacks entirely because BAcKWARdS ComPaTIbilitY, but this at least ensures that things over PID 127 won't burn the house down when 1.12 gets here. This also reduces conflicts with 4.0 line.
Encoded tags larger than 32KB overflow the length field, so we can't send these over network. However, it's unreasonable to randomly throw this burden off onto users by crashing their servers, so the next best solution is to just not send the NBT. This is also not an ideal solution (books and the like with too-large tags won't work on the client side) but it's better than crashing the server or client due to a protocol bug. Mojang have confirmed this will be resolved by a future MCPE release, so we'll just work around this problem until then.
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 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...
