Thiemos Archiv

How to prepare your codebase for PHP 8

PHP 8 is planned to be released in November 2020. And while you might want to wait a few weeks or months before you start updating your production servers, you will definitely need to do it in November 2022 when all PHP 7 support ends.

The changes in PHP 8 are rather significant, compared to all previous releases – even compared to PHP 7.0. Sure, getting rid of register_globals was an enormous change. But it took a very long time, dating back as far as 2001, when $HTTP_POST_VARS was introduced as a first attempt to solve the problem. PHP 8 gets rid of more confusing, sometimes embarrassing design mistakes in a shorter time.

I compiled the following list from the work-in-progress upgrade notes with MediaWiki development in mind where we already have rather high standards.