When support for PHP 5.3 will end?

The latest version of PHP 5.3 was released and it marks the end of life of the PHP 5.3 series. How long will Nette continue to support PHP 5.3?

Nette always tried to support old versions. We said goodbye to PHP 5.2 when version 2.1 was released on January 1, 2014, three years after support was ended by PHP. I must say, that support for 5.2 including buggy version 5.2.0 costs a lot of effort, but thanks to the converter framework was for long time written in 5.3 and leaving 5.2 needs only minor code cleanup.

In comparison, the support for 5.3 is cakewalk. PHP 5.4 brings from the framework's perspective nearly no major improvements, it just eliminates a few workarounds for $this in an anonymous functions. This also applies to the versions 5.5 and 5.6.

To be sure, it is definitely good and recommend to use the latest PHP version and enjoy all the new features. Framework supports i.e. traits and is tested under all recent versions. However support for 5.3 doesn't cause problems and therefore there is no need to push for an early update. It occurs as soon as statistics shows that the newer versions have a significant majority. It definitely will not happen in year, but for how long, I can not guess. And then we will decide which version move to.