PHP 5.5 on Windows XP

Hey all! Happy Halloween! :pumpkin:

First, let me address what you may have been waiting over 10 years for: I’m [i]not[/i] dead, yo! (Misinformation and hyperbole there. :rofl:) Not sure if I had seen that when I was last posting (later in '03), but it made me laugh when I found that awhile ago! :blush:

So anyway, I’m back to ask: Does anyone else still using XP want to run PHP 5.5? :cool: I know I was pretty surprised and disappointed when I heard that XP support would be dropped. :injured: I hadn’t been using PHP much for a while (long before 5.5’s official release in June), but had been doing some PHP internals development a few years ago. So I wondered if it would be able to be made to work on XP easily enough. I just came back to modifying and compiling PHP to fix a Windows microtime() precision “bug” introduced earlier this year, and decided to experiment with 5.5. :smiley: YES, it was trivial to at least get the PHP 5.5 core (didn’t try extensions yet; should be OK) running on XP! Running fine as far as I could tell in my limited testing. :slight_smile:

I’ll try to make builds available fairly soon regardless, and keep them going (automated…), but just thought I’d see what the interest/feedback was like around here first. I’m kinda surprised nobody else has created XP builds online! Are developers really no longer using XP for dev testing?! I mean XP is still a big chunk of Windows usage in general, so I thought there’d be a similar amount of PHP’ers that also want to use the latest version!

Unfortunately, the ONLY two XP machines I have is 1 physical machine for running a few applications that I need on rare occasions (and because I’m too cheap/lazy to buy and install Windows 7, let alone the hardware would be crushed) and I have 1 virtual machine that I use to remote into work as needed.

I don’t use XP for any development work anymore. I use Linux and Windows 7 (at work).

I would think developers are the type of users who would have switched to newer versions of Windows some time ago. It’s not the case of some secretary in a huge corporation who has to use software developed 10 years ago on an old system that works just right for that purpose. For web development a rather modern OS is needed to run not only php but many other pieces of software like modern browsers, IDE’s, editors, FTP clients, database management programs, virtual machines, graphics software, version control software, Flash, Java, etc. etc. Even if I could run php on an XP system it becomes harder and harder to run the other up-to-date components that are needed for web development. So I’d say for any serious web development XP is too outdated at the moment unless you need to use only a narrow set of technologies to get the job done.