Drop support of too old PHP versions

So you would consider this an easy transition: CI rewrites v4 using the new features in PHP. Namespaces, traits, closures. Or they could go really bleeding edge and use generators. Presumably they'd also embrace auto-loading, meaning the $this->load pattern will not exist. Every controller and model in your project will require changes. All existing addons will break and require updates.

That is not a decision that should be made lightly, especially considering CI's past upgrade requirements.

Lets take a step back.  Just imagine there is no CI 4.0.  You wanted the new features in PHP.  What would you do?  Oh yeah, so you would have to move to laravel and symfony.  You would have to migrate your code.

So that said.  Why not have CI 4.0 be the same thing?  CI really needs to move things forward.  Why should developers who are happy to migrate their codebase because its in active development be constrained because of developers like you who want an upgrade path when it makes no sense to do so.

Like I say.  Keep CI 3.0 as the last version for everyone to use.  Keep on updating it and then those guys will be happy.  Have an entirely new CI 4.0 branch and let those who can easily upgrade, upgrade.  If you can't stay on CI 3.0.

It's like Microsoft keeping 8bit libraries for those who keep on developing for Windows 3.1.  There's a point where it needs to be cut from the software base.  

Closures are very nice for some things, but they really came in 5.3 so 5.3 seems like the magic number to me.

Yeah nevermind that according to PHP http://php.net/eol.php it says:

5.3 14 Aug 2014 3 months ago 5.3.29

Oh but wait, if you are on CentOS 6 sure, 5.3 will be supported until 2020. Nevermind that if you are in active development, servers have already been upgraded to 7 and php 5.4 is available.

Seriously, CI is not going to go anywhere except being a niche framework if this mentality of the race to the bottom continues.