Phpredis: Removing support for PHP 5

[michael-grunder]

Hey everyone,

PHP 5 is now officially EOL, and we want to remove support for it.

Presently, Phpredis is littered with code in order to support both PHP 5 and PHP 7 in a single branch. Although it does work pretty well for us, it means any improvement or bug-fix has to be tested twice and sometimes has to actually be written twice.

Examples are all over the code, but here's one:

#if (PHP_MAJOR_VERSION < 7)
        zval *z_ret;
        MAKE_STD_ZVAL(z_ret);
#else
        zval zv, *z_ret = &zv;
#endif

It's even worse than this because we're also limited in what features we can use from PHP 7 (e.g. the new argument parsing macros unless we want to duplicate the functionality ourselves.

This is making Phpredis slower, buggier, and and more painful for maintainers and users alike.

We want to remove support for PHP 5 so we can focus on adding features and making Phpredis faster. I've updated and pinned this issue so that hopefully more people will see it and let us know how big an issue it will be for them.

The current plan is to release one more version that supports PHP 5 (probably 4.2.1) and then only support PHP 7 for versions beyond that.

Let us know how painful the removal of PHP 5 will be for you:

Thanks,
Mike

[yatsukhnenko]

I think we should create legacy branch and backport some critical changes if this will be needed.

[michael-grunder]

I'm not opposed to back-porting critical updates but on the other hand, PHP 5.x won't even get security fixes after the end of the year, so I'm fine with _not_ back-porting changes too.

Maybe we can play it by ear based on how much pain it ends up causing users.

[yatsukhnenko]

@michael-grunder, I agree, we need to completely drop support of PHP 5

[michael-grunder]

The develop branch now only supports PHP7.

Closing this issue, and forgetting PHP5 ever existed. 🤣