My personal experience of PHP4 is simply one of having been developing all my code in PHP5.0 to 5.2 but ensuring that the code also still run clean on the PHP4 host. It was not until 5.3 that it was necessary to freeze the code base for 5.2 for every PHP4 host and maintain that fork while 'taking advantage' of the new features of PHP5 that were not supported by PHP4. That is the code base that is currently populating the vast majority of PHP powered sites still, so while PHP4 is dead it's footprint still lives on.
Moving code to a post PHP5.4 host is NOT simply a matter of configuring the configuration to hid the problems. Many features relied on by code up to 5.2 had been removed and so code HAS to be reworked ... or hosting remains with some pre5.4 compromise which accounts for the current usage of PHP5.3 PHP7 is proposing a LOT of shiny new features which will break much legacy code. So the question has to be just what is the plan regarding cross version support. I see that the general consensus is PHP5 should just run? But do we have to start taking greater care of third party libraries which as with the 5.2 to 5.4 switch means that two versions are needed? I've currently deliberately configured my development system so that PHP5 and PHP7 are running the same code set and once I have all the missing extensions I can start playing further, but I need to work out how to allow 'needs PHP7' libraries in parallel. There IS a clear speed advantage, but I'm not sure yet if that is PHP5.4 to later 5.x or simply 5 to 7 improvements. I'm don't see any reason to think it's not simply 5->7 so I can then check the impact of things like 'unconstrained integer', however THAT is going to require a lot more care with the code than simply 'it runs' :( In the past using 32 bit builds has been a fix for many problems, not just the windows platform ones, so removing that prop requires a lot more care! -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
