[wp-hackers] php -v

[Andrew Nacin]

On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Gabriel Acosta <gabo.acosta624 at gmail.com>wrote:

> To sum it up, I agree that you might not gain from a performance stand
> point, but certainly you're not winning new developers either by staying as
> is.


No one is suggesting we're staying as-is. Rather, we've been evolving
fairly rapidly across the board. The argument is simply that PHP 5.2 isn't
slowing is down, and that dropping support for it won't provide any
benefit. PHP 5.2 is plenty modern for what we're aiming to do.

We added WP_Theme in 3.4 and WP_Post in 3.5. Both were used to rewrite
older code, improve performance and caching, and fix some long-standing
bugs. WP_Comment is probably next, along with WP_Term. But beyond cleanup,
they're setting the stage for us to move on exciting new things. For
example, they'll probably be decorated with methods for CRUD and other
operations. There's now a whole roadmap that outlines how we plan to remake
terms (adding meta) and possibly add post relationships — which wouldn't be
possible without these kinds of major changes:
http://make.wordpress.org/core/2013/07/28/potential-roadmap-for-taxonomy-meta-and-post-relationships/.
Here's a flash talk I gave in August that touches on how we evolve forward
without breaking sites — which includes PHP version and OOP (or whatever)
just the same: http://vip.wordpress.com/2013/09/27/nacin-wordpress-evolves/.

All I've mentioned here is bringing a little OOP to our objects. This is
just the tip of the iceberg.

Nacin