RE: [PHP-DEV] Future stability of PHP?
| From: | Jeffrey Dafoe | Date: | Mon, 10 Apr 2023 12:35:44 +0000 |
| Subject: | RE: [PHP-DEV] Future stability of PHP? | ||
| References: | 1 2 3 4 5 | Groups: | php.internals |
| Request: | Send a blank email to internals+get-119852@lists.php.net to get a copy of this message | ||
> I wonder about this every time I hear this claim. What exactly changed in PHP
> 8.0 that made the upgrade path so difficult? The upgrade to PHP 9 may be a
> little more difficult because of some of the recent deprecations, but that's
> still years ahead of us. So what's exactly driving people away from PHP 8?
> Why is the adoption dwindling?
The change in null handling. We have a codebase that dates to 1998. It's fairly well written.
Upgrading to 8 was a major effort (4 devs, 2 QA) that took almost a year due to the change in null
handling. We have 40 XML and JSON APIs with various banks. Elements may or may not exist. The
database, which is 45TB, has nulls all over it. And when it was all "upgraded" to run on
PHP8 all we really got that was useful to us is two new string functions. And a codebase that now
has ?? as every third line.
-Jeff