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Sun, 28 May 2006

Upgrading from PHP4 to PHP5

So, I’ve spent some time upgrading the darwingames.com codebase to be PHP5 compatible. For those considering the transition (and language designers who are considering an incompatible source version upgrade), I offer the following observations.

The Good:

Relatively few files and/or lines needed to be changed. The major “classes” of changes were:

The Bad:

Most of the “PHP5 changes” taken individually really do make it a better language. However, there are some significant problems and barriers faced by PHP5 due to some of the decisions the implementors have made (remember, this is from a user’s/programmer’s perspective).

So, when designing incompatible language changes let me offer this advice:

Having only browsed through the PHP codebase a few times in my years of using PHP, I am totally unqualified to make sure these recommendations are feasible, but from a user of the language’s perspective, they’d be items I’d appreciate (and if this experience report helps you in your PHP4-PHP5 transition, I’m glad :^).

22:46 CST | category / entries
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