This introduces static getters for every currently-known effect type. At some point in the near future, the magic number constants (which are really network IDs, by the way) will disappear.
Migrating:
- If you used constants (like any sensible person would): for the most part it's just a case of adding a () anywhere you used an Effect constant.
- If you hardcoded magic numbers: ... well, have fun fixing your code, and I reserve the right to say "I told you so" :)
This achieves multiple goals:
1) creating an EffectInstance for application is much less verbose (see diff for examples, especially the Potion class)
2) plugin devs cannot use magic numbers to apply effects anymore and are forced to use type-safe objects. :)
This is a warning shot for plugin devs who use magic numbers. More changes like this are coming in the not-too-distant future.
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.
