Agreed. They are getting closer apparently but now the question is closer to what? Will vBulletin 4.2.2 be PHP 5.4 compatible AND 5.5 compatible? or will we need to wait for 4.2.3 or 4.2.4 to upgrade to PHP 5.5?
Paul, are you able to comment at all on my question about PHP 5.5? Most of the discussions here and elsewhere to date have focused on 5.4 but given that 5.5 appears to offer further advantages in speed, etc., my preference would be to bypass 5.4 and upgrade from 5.3 to 5.5...
We run PHP 5.5 on all our servers, and there is a decent/measurable speed increase over 5.4. The different between 5.4 and 5.3 was *huge* though... used a TON less memory and was *much* faster. If you can use 5.5, use it... if you can't use 5.5, but can use 5.4, use it.
I agree with @digitalpoint . PHP does one hell of a job moving from new version to next version. They always greatly improve their core when they release an update. I myself use a ton of PHP+Curl web applications for various tasks and the performance improvement is definitely noticeable between the versions.
There are no specific changes in 4.2.2 for php 5.5. The only major change in 5.5 I'm aware of [that would affect vB] is the deprecation of MySQL, but vB will also run on MySQLi, you just need to change it in the config file.
PHP needs to figure out how to somehow incentivize server admins to upgrade... As good as 5.4/5.5 are, only 6.7% of servers are running higher than version 5.3 currently. Hell, I'd be happy just to get servers to dump 5.2 so we can realistically start making 5.3 the minimum version of some stuff so we can use stuff like late static bindings. In 5.5, the deprecation of the /e modifier use in preg_replace() also affects vB4. In includes/class_core.php as well as includes/functions.php
