Is CI4 fully production-ready ? Worth it switching from CI3 to CI4 ?

I'm a huge fan of Codeigniter. Especially Codeigniter 3, & I have been using it for more than 1.5 years.
In that time, I have developed a large amount of Sites, APIs, & other applications using CI3.
It has been a very important part of my Development Stack.

But recently, I've seen that a new version was released.

I've been experimenting with CI4 for quite some time & It's just simply amazing. I love every single thing about It so far.

The only thing I'm somewhat worried about is whether CI4 is considered Future-proof & Production-ready.
I plan to use it for my next project and learn as I go with it.

I wanted to hear the opinions of the community.

Any insight is greatly appreciated. Thank you
Regards.

@Demonicious,

I would say it is definitely Production-ready. It is currently being used by many in the CI community. Check the CI forums. As far a Future-Proof, I would say that it uses a lot of the current best practices of coding (and some of the PSRs). So based on that I would definitely say it is Future-Proof.

Here are some examples...
https://forum.codeigniter.com/thread-73536.html
https://forum.codeigniter.com/thread-75935.html

You asked whether CI4 is production ready. I would say yes. However, I would also ask what are your intents. If you want a legacy php application that scales horribly but is easy to host than php is perfect. If you would like to build a modern application that scales well than I would say you are far off your target. People here they host their applications on shared hosts. Half of them don't even know or understand what the cloud is. They choose to ignore it. Instead they decide to create frameworks based on antiquated languages. Even worse they decide to perpetuate that software through young minded human beings that don't know any better. CI has been around for what… my god I think now nearly 10 years. In those nearly 10 years nothing has really changed. I mean they have changed some things but nothing really meaningful has changed. Web development in the last 10 years has changed very much. You ask about CI4. When what you really should be asking is about PHP. Many vendors have completely stopped supporting PHP. AWS doesn't support PHP in their serverless environment.

You asked whether CI4 is production ready. I would say yes. However, I would also ask what are your intents. If you want a legacy php application that scales horribly but is easy to host than php is perfect. If you would like to build a modern application that scales well than I would say you are far off your target. People here they host their applications on shared hosts. Half of them don't even know or understand what the cloud is. They choose to ignore it. Instead they decide to create frameworks based on antiquated languages. Even worse they decide to perpetuate that software through young minded human beings that don't know any better. CI has been around for what… my god I think now nearly 10 years. In those nearly 10 years nothing has really changed. I mean they have changed some things but nothing really meaningful has changed. Web development in the last 10 years has changed very much. You ask about CI4. When what you really should be asking is about PHP. Many vendors have completely stopped supporting PHP. AWS doesn't support PHP in their serverless environment.

In addition to the fact that I can't agree with cilover85 about nothing changed in 10 years in CI (haven't you looked at the source code of CI4 on at least GitHub without downloading anything?) I want to explain a couple of areas no modern framework can still beat the old timers for the reasons I described below.

Angular + Node.JS or React-based app development is considered modern web development today, here are some of the issues they still have to date:

1. SEO : Search engine bots, in particular Google Bots' A.I.  (the same company that invented Angular)* still can't correctly parse HTML (let alone dynamically generated HTML on the DOM via JS) so all web CMS still need server-side HTML generators where the planet is still bound to ASP.NET / ASP.NET Core / PHP / Java (Servlet / JSP), etc.
   
2. Many of the super modern cloud companies with awesome modern web apps are ironically using WordPress for their web site (the CMS which needs to run nested queries with a permutation of all possible unnecessary SQL joins you can think of just to load a page or save it in the post editor).
   
3. CI 4 is by far the most viable choice for Web CMS with so many libraries and related functions built-in - and search engine bots like to see eagerly-loaded HTML content
   
4. CI 4 (thus PHP) is an excellent choice for any app which needs to be coupled with a front-end web site published on the Internet and wanted to be found by search engine bots. (Also for the Intranet as well, if the used (Intra-)search engine indexing mechanism is not able to understand what content JS code is creating on the DOM)
   
5. Lack of Stability: NPM libraries more volatile than the stock market: Start using a dependency today, regret it next month, because it will either be deprecated or one of its dependencies will be, or a security vulnerability will jeopardize your entire feature. You will work hard to get everything back together with a substitute, but in a few weeks boom! Another one. And another one in between  a couple of days or weeks. Then yet another one. You have to give up your life and dedicate the rest of your days to baby-sitting components whose developers are toying irresponsibly without backwards compatibility. If you have the money you can of course hire 2-3 coders only to baby-sit the NPM dependencies with endless efforts to stabilize the project.
   

Don't get me wrong, I already use Node.js for some of my work, too, but everything has its own place.

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You asked whether CI4 is production ready. I would say yes. However, I would also ask what are your intents. If you want a legacy php application that scales horribly but is easy to host than php is perfect. If you would like to build a modern application that scales well than I would say you are far off your target. People here they host their applications on shared hosts. Half of them don't even know or understand what the cloud is. They choose to ignore it. Instead they decide to create frameworks based on antiquated languages. Even worse they decide to perpetuate that software through young minded human beings that don't know any better. CI has been around for what… my god I think now nearly 10 years. In those nearly 10 years nothing has really changed. I mean they have changed some things but nothing really meaningful has changed. Web development in the last 10 years has changed very much. You ask about CI4. When what you really should be asking is about PHP. Many vendors have completely stopped supporting PHP. AWS doesn't support PHP in their serverless environment.

Hello all. I would also like to add that AWS now supports PHP in their LAMBDA service for serverless. I don't think PHP is going anywhere.