zlacker

>>TimWol+(OP)
As someone who has written in past a lot of PHP and Python, I find it interesting that PHP devs can do a lot of breaking changes, and don't get a huge amount of flak for it.

Python 2 -> 3 change really was painful for Python community, but PHP does these almost fundamental breaking changes so often, that maybe people just get used to it? I haven't really followed Python past version 2, but I think they are less likely to ever do such amount of breaking changes.

There must be a lot of unmaintained PHP codebases that will break if PHP is updated by hosting provider etc. Someone must be pulling a lot of hairs because of this.

Edit: Those dogpiling there, I rest my case with josefresco's comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33907628

It's painful. Dropping dynamic properties? That will be a lot of fun. WordPress is probably biggest segment for PHP usage.

>>Cianti+R7
Can you give some specific examples? I can't think of too many 'fundamental breaking changes' in PHP between major versions. Some things that will be changed in 9 are now deprecated in 8.2.

PHP has gone through a few changes.

PHP 3->4 was a moderately big change under the hood, and introduced a lot of new things, but most 3 'worked' under 4 (but was... awkward).

PHP 4->5 - a few 'big' things changed - XML processing changed - I had to use some shims to get some projects upgraded.

PHP 5->7 - my recollection, and that of most colleagues, is that this was pretty painless for most projects. I can't recall too many major breaking changes, but it was mostly just getting a doubling of speed without any substantive changes.

The PHP community has a couple decades of 'major version changes' to look at to learn from. I still can't say I agree with 100% of the decisions, but it's still progressing nicely.

>>mgkims+S8
> PHP 5->7 - my recollection, and that of most colleagues, is that this was pretty painless for most projects.

They replaced the MySQL plugin in version 7. All MySQL code was broken. I don't know, but I'd guess that most PHP sites were using MySQL as their database (the 'M' in 'LAMP' stands for MySQL).

>>denton+Vj
I thought I had to replace all my mysql code in a massive overhaul to upgrade from 5.x to 7.x.

Then I read a little closer, and realized I pretty much just had to add an "i" onto all the underlying mysql functions ("mysql_" to "mysqli_"), at least for the ones I was using commonly.

I'm still in the process of migrating that project, now on 7.4, to a modern Symfony framework, but I tested it out in 8.1 the other day, and it needed...1 change to work apparently perfectly.

I'm still going to need to do more thorough testing before I put production on 8.x, but with 7.x now unsupported, that has become a priority.