The HHVM project has made an announcement on their site about the latest update for the PHP language processor, v3.24 and how, among the list of changes, they're completely dropping support for PHP 5.

HHVM 3.24 is released! This release contains new features, bug fixes, performance improvements, and supporting work for future improvements. [...] 3.24 is the final release targeting PHP5; this includes source-level compatibility for PHP5 extensions (ext_zend_compat). We recommend migrating to Hack or PHP7.

As 3.24 is supported though 2018-12-17, this means that support will end at roughly the same time as PHP5 itself is scheduled to become unsupported (2018-12-31).

Other updates in the release include the retiring of support for Debian 7 Wheezy and Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty, the inclusion of "using" blocks and the addition of the XHP Attribute Spread Operator. You can find out complete details about this release from the HHVM blog.

In a post to his site Adam Culp makes a recommendation to all of those running their applications on older versions of the language: stop the pain, get to PHP7.

So, now you may be asking, “What does [my football story] have to do with upgrading to PHP version 7?” The answer, because many are letting the pain of moving to PHP 7 prevent them from experiencing the pleasure and rewards.

PHP version 7.0 was released almost 2 years ago. (1 year 10 months to be exact.) And many are still running PHP version 5.something. As a matter of fact, PHP version 7.0 is already going to run out of active community support in only 1 month and will only receive security fixes for another year after that.

He then talks about some of the pains that usually come with upgrading, especially when the jump is a relatively large one (like from the 5.x world). He mentions the acclamation of limitations that is all too easy to get used to with older versions. He also covers some of the pleasures that come with PHP 7 including one of the most major ones: the instance performance boost it gives most applications.

The HHVM project (an alternative PHP runtime from Facebook) has made a major announcement on their blog - beginning with version 3.24 they'll no longer be trying to keep parity with the PHP language now that it has moved into PHP 7.

The HHVM team is happy about the direction PHP has taken with PHP7, and we’re proud of the role we’ve played in pushing the language and runtime to where they are today. Since the PHP community is finally saying goodbye to PHP5, we’ve decided to do so as well.

Our next LTS release, 3.24, will be cut about four months from now and will receive support for one year thereafter. It will also be the last HHVM release that commits to PHP5 support. This aligns with PHP’s own timeline of sunsetting PHP5 at the end of 2018.

[...] PHP7 is charting a new course away from PHP5, and we want to do the same, via a renewed focus on Hack. Consequently, HHVM will not aim to target PHP7. The HHVM team believes that we have a clear path toward making Hack a fantastic language for web development, untethered from its PHP origins. We’d do ourselves and our users a disservice by positioning HHVM as an uncommon, less well-documented, less compatible PHP7 runtime.

The post then lists out some of their goals for the HHVM/Hack projects moving forward including reinvesting in open source and staying focused on their needs for the platform and language. It then talks about some of the upcoming changes you can expect around support of current versions of popular PHP tools and work on tools created specifically for Hack.

On his site Derick Rethans has posted an announcement about a major change in the Xdebug project (a widely used PHP debugger) he leads, saying goodby to PHP 5.

A few days ago I merged a patch into on GitHub. Maintaining PHP 5 and PHP 7 support in one code base is not particularly easy, and even more complicated for something like Xdebug, with its deep interactions with PHP's internals.

As PHP 5.6's active support has ended on December 31st, I also felt it no longer needed to support PHP 5 with Xdebug any more. It saves more than 5000 lines of code.

He shares some of the responses to the change (via Tweets) from the community ranging from full support to outcry over the change. He points out that the current version of Xdebug (2.5) will continue to operate on PHP 5 systems but when Xdebug 2.6 rolls around, the 2.5 branch will only receive bugfixes and no new features. You can find out about those upcoming features here.

The final day of 2016 has come and gone and with it came the end of active support for the PHP 5.6 series of releases. This also marks the end of active support for anything in the PHP 5.x major release and pushing on with PHP 7. In this post to thePHP.cc blog Sebastian Bergmann talks about what this means for you and the tools you use.

The active support by the PHP project for PHP 5.6, the final release series of PHP 5, ends today. What is "active support"? And what does it mean for you? To answer this, you need to understand PHP's release process.

He starts with the release schedule and when it shifted from the "consensus based model" over to an official process, introducing more formality to the whole process (in 2012). He mentions two key terms to the process: "active support" and "security support". PHP 5.6 has moved past active support and is now in the the security support phase with only security fixes to be released from here on out. Sebastian then talks about what this means for your current code and, if you're still running on PHP 5.6, what you should do to come up to speed with PHP 7.x. He lists some of the projects that are moving into the world of PHP 7 only including PhpSpec 4.0, Laravel 5.5 and Symfony 4.

The TutsPlus.com site has a new tutorial posted showing you how to upgrade your Linux server to run PHP 7.0, the latest major release of the PHP language.

PHP 7 was released last December. Once you've tested your code locally to run on it, it's time to upgrade your production server. Generally, I found that most of my sites run well on it.

However, I suspect that not many sites have upgraded yet. It's often safer and easier to stay on older releases. [...] But PHP 7 has now been out for nearly a year.

In today's episode, I'll walk you through my recommended approach to upgrading to PHP 7 on Ubuntu 14.x and resolving problems with PHPMyAdmin, which a lot of early upgraders ran into.

He starts by helping you identify any customizations that you might have related to PHP 5, specifically related to configuration options. He then provides the commands to remove PHP 5 packages from the system and add in the "ondrej/php" PPA for apt-get as the source for the PHP 7 packages. After a quick apt-get cleanup, he includes the commands to install the "php7" packages, enable a few extra modules and getting phpMyAdmin back up and in working order.

The Tumblr Engineering blog has a new post with details about how they made the switch to PHP 7 in their previously PHP 5 codebase (and some of the things they learned along the way).

At Tumblr, we’re always looking for new ways to improve the performance of the site. This means things like adding caching to heavily used codepaths, testing out new CDN configurations, or upgrading underlying software.

Recently, in a cross-team effort, we upgraded our full web server fleet from PHP 5 to PHP 7. The whole upgrade was a fun project with some very cool results, so we wanted to share it with you.

They start off with the timeline of events, starting with the original hackday project out through the final PHP 7 deployment in production less than a year later. They cover some of the testing methods they employed during the transition and the impact of the update on their application on request latency, CPU load and memory usage. They wrap up the post talking about some of the PHP 7-specific things they made use of in their update including anonymous functions and scalar type hinting.

Chike Mgbemena has a new post to his site looking at PHP 7 and the abstract syntax tree and uniform variable syntax changes that came along with it.

On my previous post (PHP 7 In-depth Look), I discussed in-depth about the features of PHP 7 (you can read it here if you have not). In this post, I am going to be talking about The Abstract Syntax Tree(AST)/Uniform Variable Syntax in PHP 7+.

PHP 7 introduced a new layer which is called the Abstract Syntax Tree(AST) which helps in decoupling the process of parsing from the pseudo-compile process. Note that this new layer does not have much impact on performance but it make the syntax uniform. Uniform variable syntax/abstract syntax tree aims to establish internally consistent variable syntax, references are accessed from left to right instead of right to left.

He goes on to talk about dereferencing, how it changed from the PHP 5 handling and what IIFEs have to do with it. Some sample code is included showing some of his points and how PHP 7 interprets things slightly different than PHP 7.

Freek Van der Herten has a post to his site about another new library he's worked on (along with two others) to help convert PHP 7 code back to PHP 5 code - 7to5.

In the JavaScript world converting modern code to an older syntax is quite common. In the PHP world you don’t see that happen often. Symfony provides a few [polyfills](https://github.com/symfony/polyfill), but a full fledged conversion isn’t available. At the meetup of [our local PHP user group](http://www.meetup.com/phpantwerp/) [Jens Segers](https://twitter.com/jenssegers), [Hannes Van de Vreken](https://twitter.com/hannesvdvreken) and I were toying around with the idea of converting PHP 7 code to equivalent PHP 5 code automatically.

Today our little hobby project called 7to5 was tagged 1.0.0. You can view the repo on GitHub.

He starts by talking about what the library does to backport the code from PHP 7 to PHP 5 and how to install/use the command line tool. He then gets into things "behind the curtains" with a sample PHP 7 class and the resulting PHP 5 code. They made use of the PHP Parser tool for processing the PHP code provided. It does matching on certain element types and performs the token replacement. He gives examples of this with the null coalesce operator replacement and scalar type hinting.

The Toptal blog has a new post talking about PHP 7 including some of the new things it includes (and what's gone from previous versions of the language).

One of the most exciting events in 2015 in the PHP world was the release of PHP 7, 10 years on from the release of the last major version, PHP 5. With a major step forward, PHP 7 introduces plenty of new features and performance upgrades. [...] This guide should serve as a quick tour on what to expect if you plan on moving your existing applications, or building new ones, on top of PHP 7.

He starts with a topic quite a few people wondered about - "where did PHP 6 go?". Following this he gets into some of the performance boosts that PHP 7 brings with it and updates to the "syntactic sugar" it offers developers to make their lives easier. He then gets in to the new features in this version like:

• Scalar Parameter Types & Return Type Hints
• Engine Exceptions
• Anonymous Classes
• CSPRNG Functions
• Unicode Codepoint Escape Syntax

He finishes off the article looking at the migration from PHP 5 to PHP 7 and highlights some of the potential compatibility issues that could pop up during the migration.