I envy the fast development cycles the PHP language developer team is doing. From five years until now, I’d say PHP has had a completely overhaul since the time I stopped web development.
As a long-time PHP developer, its way too fast. We're forced to constantly upgrade for features that don't really matter for most uses, but aren't backwards compatible.
As someone maintaining multiple 10+ year old PHP applications - after the migration to 7 things have been super easy/simple. Especially if you get Rector [0] involved.
Whether it’s easy or not in your particular space isn’t the problem. The problem is that it breaks period.
Some applications might be easy to upgrade. Others will not. You are forced to do work, because for some minority it feels nicer when they get to use that new feature. And it has to look a certain way, no matter the cost! Some of the stuff that’s comming will be even worse.
The even bigger issue is that your underlying tool breaks, which has an impact on dependecies as well. Foo needs version N now, but you also depend on Bar which only works with N-1.
You are under no obligation to upgrade your php version as soon as released without being able to plan for it. PHP 8.1.17 was released alongside 8.2.4 for exemple.
I think PHP is missing some kind of LTS which adds another year (or two) of support or some more stability. I wanted to say Dotnet has a longer cycle, but they have 2 years for regular and 4 year for LTS releases, while PHP has 3 years for every minor. So not that much better.
However, I had to migrate some 30k LOC app from Dotnet 3 to 6 this year and it was quite straight forward. Not that many thinks broke, and when then they were in the bootstrapping of the app.
I'm not that much into PHP anymore, so my take might be wrong. I wouldn't like to upgrade each year to a new version which breaks syntax. I would be ok to migrate every 3 or 4 years from LTS to LTS.
PHP is mostly run on Linux, and the LTS version of PHP is essentially the one shipped with your distribution. They backport most security fixes.
To use the latest PHP 8.2 version Debian or Ubuntu users need to add an external package source, meant specifically to be "on the edge" for PHP, deb.sury.org
There's a point to discuss around the lack of any official LTS version.
But GP comment is not that, it reeks of "old man yells at cloud" with zero mention of what is an issue and what isn't.
5.x -> 7+ was a pain, mainly down to those projects being without composer or other really suspect practices that need fixing at the same time. Much of the actual issue was due to particular string concatenation methods or the mysql_* lib which is easily shimmed to something like PDO.
I understand but like I said, official PHP version in your distribution packages kind of act like an LTS anyway, people who use 8.2 are using Sury or similar.
> 5.x -> 7+ was a pain, mainly down to those projects being without composer or other really suspect practices that need fixing at the same time. Much of the actual issue was due to particular string concatenation methods or the mysql_* lib which is easily shimmed to something like PDO.
That's what I meant in my other comment, while it's true, mysql_ was already being removed in favor or PDO in PHP 5's time, and PHP 5 to PHP 7 was almost a decade of developpement, so I don't think it's fair to put these issues on "too fast a developpement cycle".
What do you mean? Backwards compatibility in PHP is amazing. I have several large projects that I've been working on for 15+ years, and upgrading to newer PHP versions has been a dream.
What kind of things are you having problems with in regards to backwards compatibility?
While "abandon those projects" doesn't help someone who developped something with it and need to keep them updated, the fact is that you can just keep using the older version of the library while you do your update it works just fine on newer PHP, AND pretty much any decent sized projects doing such a switch has a large transition period where they support both, AND tooling to automate such upgrade exists AND we should be very happy about removing code from comments.
Most big projects offer a large transition period. And their "older" version works just fine on latest PHP versions anyway, so you have the time to do your upgrade. And the tooling to make such upgrade is very stable and well working, rector does 99% of the job.
I love PHP, and think updates over the last several years have been relatively painless. But it doesn't feel like it's always been that way over the last 15 years.
You're going to need to give exemples here. Upgrading has been super simple.
The one time you actually may have had to work on things was with PHP 7, but that's because they finally removed things that had been deprecated for years, some for over a decade, and all of them were security risks or massive code smell anyway.
The one thing with PHP 8 was the removal of dynamic propery, and again that's a massive code smell that was holding the language back. Any code still using it when PHP 8 released was either written over a decade ago, or something that has way more issues than that with upgrading.
