I interview a lot of php-devs, and a very large proportion of PHP shops are still on 5.4 or earlier (which is all EOL). Very often they are not at all aware of the new features in 5.5 and later.

CodeIgniter is still popular and a lot of developers have no clue about namespaces and composer usage. It will really take a _long while_ before php7 becomes commonplace.

Yeah, this is where we're at. We have a ton of old servers running hundreds of sites, some of them up to 10 years old. It's just not feasible for us to upgrade those servers unless there is a massive security issue. So we have a lot of servers running 5.3 and 5.4.

We currently run on Debian stable and don't upgrade any packages beyond what Debian is supporting. In all likelihood, we won't be using PHP 7 until the next major Debian release, which I believe is scheduled for April 2017.

Regardless, we still have to support clients that are running older instances of PHP on their GoDaddy shared hosting. If it's not EOL, we can't justify not allowing them to use it so we're stuck with 5.5+ for the time being.

The performance improvements along with the support policy should hopefully encourage many sites to move to PHP 7 within a year; PHP 5.6 will be unsupported in 8 months (though it will receive security fixes for another year).

Unfortunately several of the most popular PHP based platforms will be stuck using PHP 5.9 or older for some time. Magento just recently in version 1.9 added support for PHP 5.6. There are still an allarming number of Drupal 6 based sites out there in large scale production that have trouble supporting PHP > 5.4

The recent releases of Magento 2.0 and Drupal 8.0 should help move more sites to modern versions of PHP, but there is a lot of work still to be done on contrib modules to get full functionality out of M2 and D8

If you want to keep your sanity, don't ask the question how much of the web (even worse intraweb) is driven by php 4, 5.1 and 5.2.

> And every php developer would wish that suddenly all php in the world upgrades to v7. We are years away from 7 having a big penetration in the ecosystem. And years more till it hits enterprise.

It will depend on hosting companies for some public websites and sysadmins for internal business apps. Ironically the sysadmins I know will be the hardest people to convince, for some reasons.

that's basically why as much as I can , I chose solutions with no dependencies when I'm working on apps for internal use (like Go,Nim,..). It solves a whole lot of issues. I just can't stand having to convince someone else to do his job in order to do mine.

I'd disagree with this. Performance increases get attention from system admins. It will take time yes, but if it saves them money, they will likely investigate sooner.

GoPHP5 successfully forced the community to move to 5 en masse. We can do the same again for 7 if we need to.

We will be going live with v7 as soon as I test it on the dev servers, so probably this week. Not everyone is so slow.

Who is we?

My business has a set of 4 public websites that run (mostly) on PHP. As the lead developer it is up to me (in this company) to decide when we upgrade.

Isn't that true for users of other major languages either? Java 1.4, Python 2, ES4, etc.

Our production environment is just this month upgrading to 5.6.

DreamHost are still in the process of upgrading to 5.5.