Beta Features/PHP7

The Wikimedia Foundation has been employing to run MediaWiki in production since 2014. 

Since then, a few things happened that made it compelling for us to move back to the "official" interpreter:


 * PHP 7.x has brought huge performance improvements, so that its performance is nowadays comparable to, if not better than, HHVM for our needs. 


 * HHVM has dropped support for pure PHP in favour of Hack, an "evolution" of PHP which doesn't have widespread support. 

The Wikimedia Foundation is moving all Wikimedia wikis to use PHP7 in early 2019. 

PHP7 is available since January 2019.

You can verify that it is enabled for you by visiting 1>Special:Version|Special:Version on your wiki, and checking that it says "php" instead of "HHVM" in the "Installed software" table.

Questions and answers

 * I am a non-technical user. What does this mean?


 * Hopefully nothing. This is about changing the software used to run the wiki's code. Ideally, you should notice no real difference.


 * When will this happen?


 * Work began in 2017 and ramped up over 2018. The beta feature is available since January 2019, and PHP 7 support should be production-complete in the first half of 2019.


 * What should I do if I find an issue?


 * Report it on Phabricator, in the [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/1/?projects=php_7.2_support PHP 7.2 support project.]


 * Why are edits being tagged?

You can ignore the PHP7 tags.
 * This will help us identify performance, functional and stability concerns specific to PHP in comparison to HHVM.