In 2008, I bought a book called 'PHP 6', 2008 php_PHP Tutorial

In 2008, I bought a book called "PHP 6", php in 2008

Last Sunday, I felt that I should organize my bookcase. So, in the bookcase, I found a book that I had almost completely forgotten (I can’t remember why I bought it!): "PHP 6 – Fast and Simple Web Development"

This book was published in January 2008. Today, six years later, the latest version of PHP is still 5.5 5.6 (as I write this blog, PHP 5.6 was released, but in fact, this makes the birth of PHP 6 even more distant). Obviously, the author of this book is a master of marketing (many people, those who are not very aware of the development of PHP, still buy this book today, thinking that it is a newly published book), which seems to reflect Learned some about the development of PHP.

According to information on Wikipedia, PHP 5.0 was released in 2005. It is estimated that the PHP 6 version will add some very useful features based on PHP 5, especially support for Unicode. But in fact things did not develop as predicted, and many features designed in PHP 6 were later put into PHP 5. 9 years later, we're still stuck with PHP 5. Yes, it seems that the development of PHP is accelerating recently. The legendary PHPNG (PHP Next Generation) will bring about significant improvements in performance (there are many other grammatical improvements), and it will be used as PHP 7. Basics (they went beyond PHP 6 to avoid confusion with previous design routes, such as the knowledge covered in my book), and there are other improvements, such as HHVM (PHP Just-In-Time Compilation).

Given the important influence of the PHP language (you have to know that WordPress - the blogging system used by 23% of the websites on the entire Internet - is written in PHP.), I believe that PHP will continue to develop. I don’t know much about the PHP community, and I don’t know why the development of PHP is so slow, but judging from many hosting providers, in order to avoid compatibility issues, they prefer to use older versions of PHP (even those who have or will unsupported version).

As a result, some popular software, such as WordPress, can no longer increase 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 As a result, more than 20 million users are still using outdated and potentially security-hazardous versions of PHP on their websites. If you have time, you can read the Twitter discussion on this issue (pay attention to the date of the discussion). I believe it will give you a better understanding of the complex situation.

<p>我们打算在今年3月份停止对PHP进行维护支持。可同时，65%的WordPress网站仍然使用的是PHP 5.2。真不愿看到这样的情况，但没有办法。</p>
<p>&mdash; Andrew Nacin (@nacin) December 20, 2012</p>

<p>PHP的不幸现状：我两年前的猜想并没有如愿，PHP 5.2仍然占有39%的份额，而且下降的速度缓慢。 https://t.co/c4ffOZyx7D</p>
<p>&mdash; Andrew Nacin (@nacin) August 6, 2014</p>