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.
* Added a new PermissionManager, remove ridiculous cyclic dependencies of Permissions on Server
Aside from all the other ridiculous design problems with the permission system, the biggest problems are its API. This is, once again, a result of poor API design copied from Bukkit.
This pull request removes all permission-related functionality from `PluginManager` and moves it to the `pocketmine\permission\PermissionManager` class.
As can be observed from the removed code in the diff, the permissions system was previously entirely dependent on the Server, because it needed to get the PluginManager for registering permissions. This is utterly ridiculous. This refactor isolates _most_ permission-related functionality within the `permission` namespace.
As mentioned above, this stupid API is a direct result of copying from Bukkit. If you look at the API documentation for Bukkit for `PluginManager` you will see that the methods I'm deprecating here are also in there.
## Changes
- Added a new `PermissionManager` class. This can be accessed via its singleton `getInstance()` static method.
- Deprecated the following `PluginManager` methods - these will be removed no later than 4.0.0:
- `getPermission()`
- `addPermission()`
- `removePermission()`
- `getDefaultPermissions()`
- `recalculatePermissionDefaults()`
- `subscribeToPermission()`
- `unsubscribeFromPermission()`
- `getPermissionSubscriptions()`
- `subscribeToDefaultPerms()`
- `unsubscribeFromDefaultPerms()`
- `getDefaultPermSubscriptions()`
- `getPermissions()`
