Microsoft says it will not support PHP 8.0 for Windows in 'any capacity'

The company currently supports the development of PHP 7.3 and PHP 7.4 and is providing assistance with security fixes for PHP 7.2

Dale Hirt, the project manager for PHP inside Microsoft, recently announced that Microsoft will not offer support for PHP on Windows 8.0 when it is released.

In a message on the PHP Internals mailing list, Hirt said that the company is "committed to maintaining development and building of PHP on Windows for 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4 as long as they are officially supported," but it has no plan to support "PHP for Windows in any capacity for version 8.0 and beyond".

PHP is a general-purpose scripting language, which is highly popular among web developers. It has evolved over the years and is used to manage dynamic content, databases, session tracking, and even build entire e-commerce sites.

PHP can be integrated with various popular databases, including Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, and Informix.

PHP is supported on Windows starting with Windows Vista. Microsoft currently supports the development of PHP 7.3 and PHP 7.4 and provides assistance with security fixes for PHP 7.2.

However, the firm now says that it has no plans to support PHP 8.0 on Windows, which is scheduled for release in November 2020.

"We know that the current cadence is 2 years from release for bug fixes, and 1 year after that for security fixes," Hirt stated.

He added that PHP 7.2 will go out of support in November, while PHP 7.3 will go into security fix mode in the same month.

"PHP 7.4 will continue to have another year of bug fix and then one year of security fixes," Hirt said.

To clarify what Hirt actually meant, PHP Release Manager Sara Golemon said on Reddit that Hirt ' s statement does not mean that PHP 8.0 will not be supported in Windows. It just means that Microsoft will not produce official builds for PHP 8.0 onwards.

"This message does NOT mean that nobody will," Sara stated.

She speculated that perhaps the project will "dust off a machine somewhere in the cloud running Windows" and "setup some automated build processes to make these ' in house '."

"These machine(s) may even be setup/maintained by the same people who were doing the official builds at Microsoft," she added.

The PHP development team last week announced the second testing release of PHP 8.0.0, Alpha 2.

The first testing release, Alpha 1, was announced on 25^th June.

PHP 7.4, the latest stable version of PHP, was released in November last year.