Hi all,
as some of you might know, HHVM has decided some time ago to drop support
for PHP, choosing to only support Hack (Facebook's own PHP-derivative
language)[1].
This forced us to consider alternatives. In particular the last major
upgrade to PHP, PHP 7, was supposed to have greatly improved the
performance of the runtime, guaranteeing performance on par with HHVM.
Given that early tests[2] showed promising performance, we decided to work
on PHP7 support and on its rollout in production.
I'm happy to announce that PHP 7 is now available as a beta feature on all
wikis, and I encourage everyone to try it out and report bugs using the
#php7.2-support tag.
After this period of beta testing, we will proceed with a progressive
rollout to a growing percentage of users, and hopefully we'll complete the
transition in the next four months.
A huge thank you to all the people who worked hard to reach this goal!
Thanks,
Giuseppe
[1]
https://hhvm.com/blog/2017/09/18/the-future-of-hhvm.html
[2]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2017-September/088854.html
--
Giuseppe Lavagetto
Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation