Drop support for older versions of php

[aivchen]

PHP 7.1 - 7.4 are not supported by php core developers. PHP 8.0 will stop to be supported in November 2023.

I suggest to drop support for all < 8.1 php versions in next major release. It would allow to use strict types for variables, parameters, use readonly properties etc.

What do you think?

[sanikolaev]

Thank you for bringing up this idea!

According to https://stitcher.io/blog/php-version-stats-january-2023, at the beginning of the year, approximately a quarter of PHP users were using PHP 7.4, and only 23% of the top 1,000 popular packages required a version >= 8.

It would be beneficial to find updated statistics. However, if the numbers haven't changed significantly, it seems premature to drop support.

[aivchen]

https://packagist.org/php-statistics

For September 2023:

I think we can drop support for php < 7.4. What do you think?

[sanikolaev]

According to https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch-php#requirements , the latest releases of the client already support PHP >= 7.4.

[aivchen]

Yes, but in composer.json the requirement is php >= 7.1.

[sanikolaev]

Yes, but in composer.json the requirement is php >= 7.1.

@Nick-S-2018 is this a mistake?

[aivchen]

Technically, this is a mistake in the documentation, because the code is more important than the documentation. Currently, all versions of manticoresearch-php can be used in any project running on php >=7.1.

[Nick-S-2018]

Done in https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch-php/commit/7ec10d479d0c9980cc14379c34d26de13a4a559b