php 5.5 support

[Adam Howard]

It took a while for XenForo to add limited support for php 5.4. I say limited as there are still some areas where this needs improving.

I'm placing my request now, that the XenForo Development Team follow and track the development of php 5.5 when time allows.

php 5.5 Alpha 1 has been released and no, I do not expect anyone to support it at this time in its Alpha or Beta state. Only that it not be delayed and that upon its gold release, that it be included in future versions of XenForo.

I would suggest also dropping support for php 5.2 which is almost 3 years old, past discontinued and end of life.

 

[Arantor]

I find it interesting that despite the fact PHP 5.5 is well into beta mode, Zend (who orchestrates PHP) still hasn't even pushed out PHP 5.4 certification yet. (Had 5.4 been an option earlier this year, I'd have taken that too, but only 5.3 certification is an option thus far.)

 

[Mike]

I find it interesting that despite the fact PHP 5.5 is well into beta mode, Zend (who orchestrates PHP) still hasn't even pushed out PHP 5.4 certification yet.

Emphasis mine.

Unfortunately, this is simply not correct. Zend is a company in the PHP environment, but PHP itself is open source project. Zend doesn't control it in anyway.

Back to the original topic, I'm moving this to resolved. It's not exactly "implemented" and it's not exactly "no thanks" but in general we simply ensure that there's compatibility with upcoming PHP versions - I didn't run into any issues when I've tested PHP 5.5 so AFAIK this is met.

 

[Arantor]

Emphasis mine.

Unfortunately, this is simply not correct. Zend is a company in the PHP environment, but PHP itself is open source project. Zend doesn't control it in anyway.

PHP is built around the Zend engine, and the people who founded Zend itself are core PHP contributors... Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, who even named Zend after themselves.

So, there is some control there. Maybe 'orchestrates' was the wrong word, but when you have the CEO and CTO of the company actively participating in the platform's development... there's some control there.

 

[Rigel Kentaurus]

Release Candidate 3 is out

http://php.net/archive/2013.php#id2013-06-06-1

For those who don't know.... An "RC" (short for "Release Candidate") is the middle ground between beta and final.

Theoretically, but obviously not always, its thought that an RC is usually stable enough that someone with enough skill can overcome any bug & actually use it on a real world use (not just on a test setup).

This is the stage where there are no new features being added and its the final round of bug fixing that before a release.


.... For those who didn't know....

My personal experience with PHP is that you want to wait for 5.5.1 or 5.5.2 at least, because by then they actually did fix all the leaks and issues. It has been like that with every release ....

Plus, are APC or ZO even compatible?

 

[Arantor]

Zend Optimizer hasn't exactly been compatible for a bit and the main reason most people used it as far as I know was to run Zend Guard encrypted scripts, but these days you'd install Zend Guard Loader for that. (ZO wasn't an opcode cache or similar, it was a tool for making some on-the-fly optimisations at parse time, though I never saw any significant gains from it)

Judging by the benchmarks they were talking about with the RFC for ZO+'s inclusion, where they specifically tried to compare APC and ZO+ from a point of view of time saved, seems like APC will still be supported, especially as APC has a storage option, while ZO+ doesn't (it's just an opcode cache)