Dale Hirt, the Microsoft Project Manager in charge of PHP has announced that they won’t be providing support for PHP 8.0 Windows when it’s released later this year.

Microsoft is committed to maintaining development and building of PHP on Windows for 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4 as long as they are officially supported but it has no plan to support PHP for Windows in any capacity for version 8.0 and beyond.

Dale Hirt - Microsoft PHP Project Manager

PHP is a general-purpose scripting language, most often used by Web Developers. Although it’s changed over the years, these days it’s mostly used when coding dynamic content, databases or session tracking.

One of the reasons for PHP’s popularity with web developers is that it can be used with other languages such as Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, and Informix.

Although Microsoft currently supports development for PHP 7.3 and PHP 7.4 and aid with security issues for PHP 7.2 it’s made it pretty clear that it won’t for PHP 8.0, due in November 2020.

We know that the current cadence is 2 years from release for bug fixes, and 1 year after that for security fixes. PHP 7.4 will continue to have another year of bug fix and then one year of security fixes.

Dale Hirt - Microsoft PHP Project Manager

Sara Golemon, the PHP release Manager quickly responded to Dale Hirt’s comments to clarify that PHP 8.0 will be supported on Windows, it’s just that Microsoft won’t be producing any official builds for PHP 8.0.

The PHP development team last week announced the second testing release of PHP 8.0.0, Alpha 2.

The first testing release, Alpha 1, was announced on 25th June.