This question is asked partially in frustration, but also partially in genuine curiosity.

What changes in recent #PHP versions have "required complete rewrites"? Really, which?

The most invasive changes I can think of in recent memory are "undefined vars are now E_WARNING" in 8.0, and "internal interfaces now have types" in 8.1. While addressing those can be annoying... they don't require a full redesign.

1/2

I know, because I *did* that update for TYPO3, which is a huge codebase. It didn't force a rewrite. It didn't take years to do. It took me maybe a month or so to fix nearly all PHP 8.0 compat issues. In a 20 year old codebase still built on arrays.

So... really, where is this idea that you're forced to "completely rewrite" code to be PHP 8 compatible coming from? I genuinely don't understand.

2/2

@Crell It's often not a complete rewrite.

It's instead death by a thousand deprecations and small changes.

Example: switching resources to objects. Great idea! I love the type safety! But it introduces subtle bugs in code that was checking for resources and verifying resource types previously. And not all of them have been switched yet!

Or deprecation of dynamic properties. You may not realize you were even using them... and now a warning, which your error handler converts to an exception.

@mwop The resource removal was more about engine simplicity; that part of the engine is totally gross and needs to be fixed. But given that, what would have been a "more friendly" way of doing that conversion? (Serious question.)