[wp-hackers] php -v

[John Blackbourn]

There has been discussion on this in various places over recent months and
years.

There is little argument in favour of raising the minimum required PHP
version to 5.3 because of the limited increase in features that it provides
over 5.2 (namespacing and closures being the main ones). This is not enough
of a feature set to warrant raising the minimum PHP version (closures would
provide no benefit to WordPress, and I love namespacing but we've survived
this long without it).

Rather than asking "Are there any plans to upgrade the minimum required
version of PHP in WP?", the question should be "If we raise the minimum
required version of PHP, will it give us enough benefit to warrant the
raise?"

So if we're talking about raising the minimum required PHP version, there
has to be a solid case for it. What benefits would we get by moving to PHP
5.3, 5.4 or 5.5? 5.4 gives us traits, but not a lot else besides various
shorthand syntaxes. 5.5 gives us generators and a new password API.

Does this list of features provide enough of a benefit to WordPress to
warrant raising the minimum required version? Are the performance
improvements in these versions enough of a benefit on their own? (They may
well be.)

When we moved from PHP 4 to PHP 5(.2) the benefit was substantial because
of the changes in the object model (visibility, abstract classes, magic
methods, autoloading) and probably other things I've not thought of. The
benefits that 5.3-5.5 provide over these are lesser in comparison.

There was some mention recently of another drive aimed at getting hosts to
update their PHP versions, similar to the GoPHP5 initiative back yonder. I
can't see this happening though.

John

On 7 November 2013 17:10, Justas Butkus <jbutkus at time.ly> wrote:

> 2013.11.07 19:04, J.D. Grimes rašė:
>
>  I’ve often thought that the lead devs should just announce that support
>> for 5.2 will be dropped by a certain date, and see what happens.
>>
> Optionally using big red box in admin notification area and suggesting
> that next minimum supported version will be PHP 5.5.
>
> Actually, with our plugin (All-in-One Event Calendar) we see a bit
> different numbers (there might be some skew):
>     - more than 55% are using WordPress 3.6.1 or earlier;
>     - more than 20% are using PHP 5.2.x or earlier.
> Sure it says little about WordPress in general, but that's mostly why I am
> interested, whereas WordPress maintainers has some chance to see, if there
> might be few major players in hosting using old versions.
>
> --
> Justas Butkus
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