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Date: Sat, 8 Apr 2023 23:04:39 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Future stability of PHP?
From: tovilo.ilija@gmail.com (Ilija Tovilo)

Hi Stephan

> I'm sorry if this isn't the correct mailing list for that discussion but I
> couldn't find a more appropriate one where people actually know how the
> wind is
> blowing.

No worries, this seems like the appropriate place.

> Is there a way to tell which APIs and language features will be stable
> and which
> might get changed or removed in the future? That way I could restrict
> myself to
> a stable subset for long-running projects (5 to 10 years). But I realize
> that
> such guarantees are difficult (or contra productive) when a language is
> in flux
> and I can understand if no one wants to do something like that.

There's no such guarantee at the moment. Anything that is agreed upon
by the 2/3 majority of voters is subject to change.

> Some of my projects run for 5 to 10 years, in one case even 20 years.

There are companies that offer extended lifecycle support for PHP
versions that have officially reached EOL (examples being Zend or
TuxCare). I'm not sure if those will get you to that 10 year mark.
Note however that deprecation notices alone should not keep you from
upgrading to a newer version, as they don't have any runtime effect
with a correct production configuration and thus aren't considered
breaking. We generally postpone larger breaking changes to major
versions. In general, I do agree that we could minimize breaking
changes more, and limit them to the things that actually provide a
tangible benefit.

Sadly, there's a conflict of interest here. There are people who want
to keep running their existing websites without having to make any
changes, and there are people who are using PHP daily and would like
to see the language evolve. We would like to satisfy both of these
groups but that is difficult when they are often directly opposed. I
do think that if we only manage to satisfy the former, PHP will
gradually become less and less significant. That would be sad.

Ilija