Microsoft ending support for PHP from PHP 8 onwards

Question

I have read that Microsoft will not be supporting PHP as of PHP8. The entire meaning is quite ambiguous. What I really wanted to know is that will PHP8 not work at all on Windows? Hence rendering all the WAMP server applications useless and hence one would need to switch Linux or Mac for all future development work?

Answer 1

There are two different things here:

1. The PHP source code needs to support running under Windows, since it doesn't present the same APIs as Linux
2. Somebody needs to compile each new version of that source code and make the resulting executable available, since few people are willing or able to compile their own copy from source

Point 1 is always a collaboration of everyone working on the open source project. Microsoft may have paid people with knowledge of the Windows platform to contribute, but there's no immediate risk of the PHP project running out of volunteers to make it work there.

Point 2 is the main thing that the project was previously relying on Microsoft for: they provided servers and staff to make sure there were up to date builds ready to download on https://windows.php.net (By comparison, Linux builds will generally be compiled and made available by distributions like Debian/Ubuntu and RedHat/Fedora.) This is a slightly harder role to replace - for one thing, servers cost money! - but it's by no means impossible.

The bottom line is that running PHP on Windows is common enough that it's very unlikely the project would decide to abandon the platform altogether, and it would almost certainly run there even if Microsoft had never provided any direct support.