Migrating to PHP 7

PHP 7.0.0 has been released for a year now.  I wasn’t in a rush to migrate to it, but with all the cool features and performance optimization, it’s definitely something I wanted to look into rather sooner than later.

It turns out that I’ve done my first PHP 7 migration a week ago, when I upgraded my laptop to Fedora 25.  Yup, that’s right.  It’s a bit embarrassing, but I have been developing on PHP 7 for a week without even noticing it.

$ php --version
PHP 7.0.13 (cli) (built: Nov 9 2016 07:29:28) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2016 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2016 Zend Technologies
with Xdebug v2.4.1, Copyright (c) 2002-2016, by Derick Rethans

I think that was due to a few things:

• It’s been quite a busy week, so my attention was all over the place.
• PHP 7 backward compatibility is pretty awesome.  There are only a few things that need fixing in the older code bases, but if you haven’t been living under a rock for the last few years, you probably have nothing to change or worry about.
• Most of the code I’m working on runs through TravisCI builds, which are executed on both PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.  Since we had this for a while now, most, if not all, of our code is PHP 7 compatible.

The absolute lack of any issues for the last week, related to this upgrade, is encouraging.  Now I will probably try to upgrade our servers sooner than later.

With that, I’ll go back to the wonderful and exciting world of PHP, leaving you to decide whether I’m very serious or very sarcastic…