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

No offense taken. The most popular PHP framework around currently is Laravel. It has a minimum requirement of 7.2 also. Symphony has 7.2.5. Cake is minimum 7.2. It's not just us.

Not everyone is in control of their server. Some people like to build products they can sell to people at which point having shared hosting requirements that are a challenge pose a blocker to people buying their products.

Composer is not a requirement for the "download and go" packages. We use it to keep a couple of third-party packages up to date. If you want to use Composer then it works out of the box. I have never come across a hosting configuration that cannot be setup to work with /public formats. CPanel is the challenging environment but even there it's possible.

December 2020 is a year away. We have time to evaluate and make the change.

As for type hints and Entities, in my experience things have a tendency to come out of the database as a string, which is what makes casting and mutations helpful.

The fun I have with this argument is that when I decided to make 7.2 the minimum a while back I got a fair amount of flack for that. No winning I guess.

I would say that you're correct in that you can't win  .

Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the PHP language has always been ridiculed and ostracized due to its loose types and this is why we see a concious effort to move the PHP core to a stronger typed language.

I understand the arguments being made for catering to the demographics of a larger audience, and I respect it. However, as a framework it'll be very hard to be taken seriously again after all the years of crap that it has received, by and large. One way to remedy this or even remove the uncertainty, would be to prove to the PHP world that the core dev team at CodeIgniter is ready to take it forward, only forward and not worry too much about BC breaks.

Which brings me to this: if the EOL for PHP is a "year away", are we going to expect the core team to issue a press-release come November or early December and surprise its users with a "guess what, PHP 7.2 reaches EOL now. Time to upgrade because going forward we are in the frameworks core requiring a minimum of PHP >=7.x", and catching everyone off guard? Or, would it possibly be beneficial to just say, before the release of 4.0, to say "Hey, we require a minimum of PHP 7.4 from the git go". Therefor nullifying anyones expectations of less.

I'm only asking because I can see it now. Imagine the PHP world being hit with the release of arguabley the oldest lasting (one of) PHP framework requiring PHP 7.4 as a minimum. One that nearly all the way up until now has been mostly ridiculed for being "old and out dated" or "not exploiting the newest technologies". There would be no way it couldn't be taken seriously. Perhaps it would bring more people to the framework from other frameworks like Slim and Laravel due to the implied seriousness and assertions of where it wants to go.

This is touching only on the PR aspect of it, not even mentioning the actual benefits of the languages newest iterations.

I may be rambling again and I apologize if I am. I'm typing this from my phone at work so it's a bit of a doozy haha. Either way keep it up Lonnie and know that regardless, some of us trust your judgement with the framework moving forward and will use it and contribute to it none-the-less

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
George R.R. Martin

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