2008 I bought a book called "PHP 6".

Last Sunday, I felt I should tidy my bookcase. So, in the bookcase, I found an almost completely forgotten book (I can't remember why to buy it!) ): PHP 6? Fast and concise web development "

The book was published in January 2008. And six years later today, the latest version of PHP is still 5.5 5.6 (when I wrote this blog, PHP 5.6 was released, but in fact, this makes PHP 6 the birth of a more unreachable). Obviously, the author of the book is a marketing guru (a lot of people, those who are not too clear about the development of PHP, are still going to buy the book today, think this is just published), this seems to reflect the development of some PHP.

According to Wikipedia, PHP 5.0 was released in 2005. It is estimated that PHP 6 will add some very useful features on top of PHP 5, especially with regard to Unicode support. But in fact things are not as predictable as this, and many of the features in PHP 6 design were later put into PHP 5. After 9 years, we can still use PHP 5. Yes, it looks like PHP's development is accelerating recently, and the legendary Phpng (PHP Next Generation) will have a significant performance boost (and many other syntactic improvements) that will be the basis of PHP 7 (they crossed PHP 6 to avoid confusion with the previous design route). , for example, the knowledge in my book), there are other improvements, such as HHVM (PHP instant compilation).

Given the significant impact of the PHP language (you know, WordPress??). The entire Internet in 23% of sites using the blog system?? It's written in PHP. , I'm sure PHP will continue to move forward. I don't know much about the PHP community and I don't know why PHP is so slow, but from many host vendors, they prefer to use older versions of PHP (even those that have been or will not be supported) to avoid compatibility issues.

In this way, some popular software, such as WordPress, can no longer improve their minimum supported version (the current minimum requirement is PHP 5.2.4), which becomes a chicken and egg problem. As a result, more than 20 million of users still use outdated, potentially dangerous versions of PHP on their websites. If you have time, you can take a look at the Twitter discussion on this issue (note the date of the discussion) and believe it will give you a better understanding of the complex situation.

We intend to stop support for PHP maintenance this March. At the same time, 65% of the WordPress site is still using PHP 5.2. I hate to see such a situation, but there is no way.

? Andrew Nacin (@nacin) December 20, 2012

The unfortunate status of PHP: My guess two years ago did not, PHP 5.2 still occupies 39% of the share, and the slow pace of decline. Https://t.co/c4ffOZyx7D

? Andrew Nacin (@nacin) August 6, 2014

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