PHP 5.3.x vs 5.4.x vs 5.5.x

PHP Roadmap & Performance
by Ryan MacDonald, Web Hosting Blog at ASO
August 20, 2013

 

Too bad vBulletin 4 doesn't support this version just yet.

 

Agreed. They are getting closer apparently but now the question is closer to what? Will vBulletin 4.2.2 be PHP 5.4 compatible AND 5.5 compatible? or will we need to wait for 4.2.3 or 4.2.4 to upgrade to PHP 5.5?

 

Is that something that @Paul M is working on it?

 

Yes.

 

Hopefully you get more help, how many months/years, does it take to update vb4?

 

Paul, are you able to comment at all on my question about PHP 5.5? Most of the discussions here and elsewhere to date have focused on 5.4 but given that 5.5 appears to offer further advantages in speed, etc., my preference would be to bypass 5.4 and upgrade from 5.3 to 5.5...

 

We run PHP 5.5 on all our servers, and there is a decent/measurable speed increase over 5.4. The different between 5.4 and 5.3 was *huge* though... used a TON less memory and was *much* faster.

If you can use 5.5, use it... if you can't use 5.5, but can use 5.4, use it.

 

Absolutely. I'll happily take 5.4 but if they're modifying code they might as well aim for 5.5.

 

There are no specific changes in 4.2.2 for php 5.5. The only major change in 5.5 I'm aware of [that would affect vB] is the deprecation of MySQL, but vB will also run on MySQLi, you just need to change it in the config file.

 

PHP needs to figure out how to somehow incentivize server admins to upgrade... As good as 5.4/5.5 are, only 6.7% of servers are running higher than version 5.3 currently.



Hell, I'd be happy just to get servers to dump 5.2 so we can realistically start making 5.3 the minimum version of some stuff so we can use stuff like late static bindings.

In 5.5, the deprecation of the /e modifier use in preg_replace() also affects vB4.

In includes/class_core.php as well as includes/functions.php

 

Oh yes, someone mentioned that to me, but I had forgotten about it. Its in several places i think.