[wp-hackers] PHP 5 any time soon?

[Dan Phiffer]

On Jan 14, 2010, at 5:54 PM, Matt Mullenweg wrote:

> On 2010-01-14 7:46 AM, Helgi Hrafn Gunnarsson wrote:
>> I'm just checking up on whether there is any intention of upgrading the
>> minimum requirement to PHP 5 soon. The reason is that I had intended to use
>> WordPress some months ago, discovering that it was quite heavy, wanting to
>> make the code faster using various PHP 5 features, only to discover that the
>> project still retained a policy of sticking to PHP 4.3.
> 
> No plans. We've general found performance enhancements to not require PHP5. If you've benchmarked and identified otherwise, please share with the community.

What about JSON/XML (i.e., libxml2) processing? Surely those would have some performance and maintenance benefits compared to pure-PHP solutions. Are those available via PECL for PHP4? I don't know much about WP internals, so perhaps they are already being used when available.

I could imagine some aspects of PHP4 being confusing for somebody who may have started out on PHP5:
"Pass an object by reference?"
"Why is my __construct method busted?"

But IMO the "It Just Works" quality of WP trumps developer convenience.

-Dan