Why you should not worry about Microsoft pulling PHP support on Windows and why is it a good thing.

As you may or may not know, PHP 8 and onwards won’t be supported by Microsoft Windows, which is a bummer for the opensource community or…

The first thing that came to my mind is “that’s great !”. That is because people will be forced to seek alternatives, which is good because will make you learn about virtualization and containerization!

Enter Docker!

If you run your PHP on Windows (and I mean use a PHP Windows build) in 2020, it’s time to learn how to modernize your knowledge and learn a little bit about Docker.

I won’t write an article (for now) on how to do it, but there is plenty of resources online, just google “what is docker” and “how to dockerize PHP“ and you are good to go on rabbit hole onwards to improve your skills and make a difference on your CV by adding the keyword “docker” on it.

But wait, there is more!

Ok, there are other ways as well of running PHP on Windows.

One that I don’t really want to talk about but kinda have to is Vagrant. It is like a precursor of what Docker is today, so learning Vagrant in 2020 is IMHO a waste of time but still an option.

Another option (which I think is what Microsoft wants you to do), if you use Windows 10, is to install the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Then you have pretty much a Linux machine and can just go and install PHP on your Ubuntu… sorry, I mean Windows 10.

Final notes

So in the end, it is a really good move from Microsoft because they are pushing a lot of trouble out. Windows supporting PHP has consequences on the PHP source-code itself to be able to be supported on Windows (like a different file system, the extension by DLL, and other problems that are unique to Windows). It also pushes WSL2 and turns Windows more into Linux making it easier by making everybody deal less and less with OSs differences.

Ideally, would be nice if the PHP community also drop support for Windows onwards, then we could do a clean up on the source code and simplify so many things (maybe even see some performance improvement ?!), but well, this is up to a decision of the PHP maintainers so I can only daydream about it.