Why we are requiring PHP 7 for our new packages
The past few weeks we released several new packages: laravel-sluggable, laravel-robots-middleware, laravel-glide and pdf-to-text. These packages have in common that they all require PHP 7. Because there were several reactions and questions about this, I'd like to shed some light on that decision.
I expect that lots of developers will make the move to PHP 7 in the coming year. Sure there will always be legacy projects that'll never see an upgrade, but it makes no sense starting a greenfield project in PHP 5.X. The performance benefits are just too good. On the package side I expect that some widely used packages will make the jump as well. Jordi Boggiano has already announced that the next version of Monolog targets PHP 7. Also keep in mind that active support for PHP 5.x is coming to end this August (or at the latest December).
Not only developers will make a quick move to PHP 7. The speed benefit is quite interesting for hosting companies as well. A speedier PHP version means a machine can host more sites. There quite a few hosting companies that already made the jump and are offering PHP 7 support.
When we work on projects at Spatie we have to solve a lot of problems. When we solve a problem in way that the solution can be used in future projects, we create a package. So we create these packages primarily for our own future projects. We decided that from now on every greenfield project wil be a PHP 7 one. So it makes sense that our new packages would require PHP 7 as well. By doing so we can make use of the latest new features such as the scalar type hints, return types, anonymous classes and the null coalescing operator. At some point all our projects will leave PHP 5.6 behind. The earlier we won't have to deal with PHP 5.X code anymore the better.
I'm well aware that requiring PHP 7 will hurt the popularity of our packages in the short run. But popularity is not our main goal. People who are using the latest and greatest version of PHP can benefit from our work. And I hope others will be nudged a bit towards PHP 7 by our decision.
(EDIT: we won't change the requirements of our older packages. PHP 7 will only be required when we create a new major version.)
