Property type hints in Codeigniter 4 (or just PHP 7.4 as a requirement)

At this time there are no intentions to raise minimum requirements to 7.4. Those on shared hosting have a limited selection of 7.2 capable-hosting as it is, the last time I checked. No need to make that even more difficult.

There is also no desire to move the framework to a completely strict typed system. Unless you've seen benchmarks that I haven't the performance gains from doing so are minimal compared to things like accessing the database, which would be one of my first choices for somewhere to optimize. PHP, as a language, is loosely typed and currently the framework takes advantage of that fact. If you want a strictly typed version there is another user on the forums that maintains a modified version, I believe.

Thank you Lonnie. This all makes sense of course, I just wanted to check. Just to be clear my intention was more along the lines of using PHP 7.4's features as a reason to advance the minimum requirement, strict types was more of an example of that. Null coalesce assignment is one example. So is Support for weak references, covariant returns and contravarian parameters is another, or the ability to unpack arrays inside of arrays to eliminate array_merge() calls is another. More of a testament to the language itself and its maturity, and whether CodeIgniter had plans to take advantage of these benefits where it made sense since PHP 7.4 has resulted in some pretty great performance benchmarks as seen here. Especially since PHP now has preloading and speed is always something CodeIgniter showcases.

Fortunately, CodeIgniter is the one framework that has always catered to the majority of users on shared hosting, etc. So that fact triumphs over other technological features I would imagine.

Anyways, thanks for entertaining my tired brains ideas

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