Require PHP >= 7.4 once WordPress 7.0 has been released?

[oliverklee]

WordPress is one of our largest dependent project. The upcoming WordPress 7.0 will drop support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3.

PHP 7.2 was EOLed in November 2020, and PHP 7.3 was EOLed in December 2021.

I'd like us to be able to use some newer PHP features.

@sabberworm @JakeQZ Would you be okay with us dropping support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3 in both our projects for the next breaking release (not urgent, some time in 2026)?

[JakeQZ]

I think it would be reasonable to drop support for those PHP versions in order to use some of the newer PHP features. Though we should only drop support as necessary for the PHP features we want to use - so if the features we want to use are available in PHP 7.3 but not 7.2, we'd only need to drop support for 7.2.

We'd also, of course, need to make a minor release that indicates support is deprecated.

[oliverklee]

Okay, then let's go for requiring PHP >= 7.4 first (as PHP 7.3 doesn't bring anything really worthwhile IMHO). I'll take care of the 2 deprecation PRs.

These are the features I'm looking particularly forward to (in addition to the developer goodness of new PHPUnit versions, including allowing me to run the tests locally with coverage):

• PHP 7.4:
  • typed properties
  • arrow functions
  • unpacking inside arrays
• PHP 8.0:
  • constructor property promotion
  • union types
  • match expressions
• PHP 8.1:
  • readonly properties
  • first-class callable syntax
  • intersection types
  • final class constants
• PHP 8.2:
  • readonly classes
  • DNF types
• PHP 8.3:
  • typed class constants
• PHP 8.4:
  • HTML5 support, new ext-dom features
• PHP 8.5:
  • pipe operator