The absence of backward compatibility in php updates should be illegal and the developers responsible for that should be trampled by an elephant with the PHP logo painted on its side.

There's an easy solution: Use a better language

Fun fact about elephants: Romans could reliably kill them only by sticking them with their spears by their asshole.

Conclusion: OP is asshole or elephant.

IMO PHP was setup so shitty originally, with core functionality wrote so shitty, that backwards compatibility really isn't possible.

Like. We wrote one of our core functions to only return false if it fails, rather than throw an exception...

Now... do you really want to KEEP that functionality?

The only thing backwards compatibility would add to modern PHP is enabling all the shit coding practices people did for decades to continue.

what kind of php versions do you have? I have some minor shit still running on code written on version 5 on a machine eith 7 installed and everything os working, after only one change: db connection.

@12bitfloat ahhh yes, because other languages never have issues with full backwards compatibility 🥴

The very presence of PHP updates, or PHP at all for what it's worth, should be illegal and the developers responsible for that should be trampled by an elephant with the PHP logo painted on its side.

@AleCx04 exactly that, db connections...
The hosting provider of my client updated the version of php on the server and he was upset my code don’t work anymore.
I don’t know about you, but I hate having to support old projects for these stupid reasons.
Exactly as the Facebook API updates that break everything.

@JS96 I would not say that I am particularly fond of updating old projects. Hell, I am not really fond of anything in the field other than money.

So no, I don't mind, as long as the cash keeps comming in then sure, Ill fix it. It is a simple issue after all. I do have seen some horrors, but this one is pretty minimal.

@AleCx04 in fact I didn’t even asked for money, but it’s just bs... something that could be avoided.

@AleCx04 Not even because of backwards compatibility just in general

But in a sense PHP breaking compatibility left and right is the best thing for it because that at least allows them to finally patch up the language. And to be fair they actually do, the latest PHP updates don't seem half bad

Backwards compatibility is a broken concept.

Release a new major version and break it.

Otherwise you end up eg like Python2 / Perl and a myriad of other projects.

You beg for over 5 years to get people to port their fucking shit over to something that isn't as bugged and security wise a nightmare.... Only to realize then that they don't give a fuck.

A lot of upstream projects / linux distributions are still fighting in the Python 2 mig. And most of them now go the simple way of ripping packages out. No python 3? Bye bye.

After 5...FIVE!!!! Fucking years.

TLDR: Backwards compatibility does not work. It cripples every form of advancement.

Break it, but keep the versioning sane.

@IntrusionCM Backwards compatibility does work. But it requires a thoughtfully designed language/system. And for all the faults C++ has (and it has many) it still shows that compatibility can work just fine