[wp-hackers] PHP5

[Otto]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Jacob Santos <wordpress at santosj.name> wrote:
> Lets list the reasons for and against going PHP5:
>
> Against:
>
> 1. Matt Mullenweg be hating PHP5 and he be the God. (Hail Satan!)
> 2. It would leave out 40% of current users (from last posted statistics from
> last year).
> 3. Did I mention Matt Mullenweg not liking PHP5? Okay, good.
>
> For:
>
> 1. PHP5 is faster than PHP4 (Most benchmarks of PHP 5.2.x show considerable
> improvement, PHP5.3 is so much faster than PHP4, that they didn't even
> attempt to compare it).
> 2. PHP5 has PDO, and mysqli.
> 3. PHP5.3 has namespaces!
> 4. PHP5.3 has closures! No more create_function nonsense, you'll be able to
> actually create a real lambda and closure for usage in
> preg_replace_callback().
> 5. PHP5 has better object oriented support, re: visibility, true static
> methods and members, class constants.
> 6. PHP5 has OO chaining: $obj->this()->shit()->is()->awesome();
> 7. Actually being worked on actively (PHP4 is EOL early last year and no
> updates for about 8 months now).
>
> So I mean, supporting PHP4 only really has one reason for going for it and
> PHP5 has many reason!
>
> Jacob Santos
>
>
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I like PHP 5. I only use PHP 5. But I gotta agree with Matt here.
Setting a site up for use of PHP 5 on many hosts is a) not the default
and b) not obvious.

It's too soon. Wait for PHP5 to be ubiquitous. I suspect that'll be
less than a year from now.

That said, we should start supporting more PHP5-only features in WP.
Stuff that doesn't show up if your PHP version doesn't support it,
sort of thing. I cannot say what these will be, but if you see a
enhancement ticket solved by use of PHP5-only functionality, then it
should be considered more instead of rejected out of hand.