[wp-hackers] PHP5

[Jacob Santos]

Lets list the reasons for and against going PHP5:

Against:

1. Matt Mullenweg be hating PHP5 and he be the God. (Hail Satan!)
2. It would leave out 40% of current users (from last posted statistics 
from last year).
3. Did I mention Matt Mullenweg not liking PHP5? Okay, good.

For:

1. PHP5 is faster than PHP4 (Most benchmarks of PHP 5.2.x show 
considerable improvement, PHP5.3 is so much faster than PHP4, that they 
didn't even attempt to compare it).
2. PHP5 has PDO, and mysqli.
3. PHP5.3 has namespaces!
4. PHP5.3 has closures! No more create_function nonsense, you'll be able 
to actually create a real lambda and closure for usage in 
preg_replace_callback().
5. PHP5 has better object oriented support, re: visibility, true static 
methods and members, class constants.
6. PHP5 has OO chaining: $obj->this()->shit()->is()->awesome();
7. Actually being worked on actively (PHP4 is EOL early last year and no 
updates for about 8 months now).

So I mean, supporting PHP4 only really has one reason for going for it 
and PHP5 has many reason!

Jacob Santos