If I still were a Drupal core developer (and I was the #1 core contributor for 5, 6 and #4 for 7 and still #10 for 8 though I regret that) I would tell you there's no tough choice here, I would target PHP 7.x and forget the rest. Currently, others steers the core and they struggle mightily with just the transition to PHP 7.0 requirement. Check the issue queue. I filed https://www.drupal.org/node/2605226 in 2015 fall but it was voted down, the current open issue is https://www.drupal.org/node/2842431

HHVM is way too niche to bother with it, sorry.

That and PATENTS:

https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/blob/master/hphp/hack/PATEN...

If Facebook had released the code under BSD then nobody would have complained.

But this basically gives a BSD plus patent grant, and reverts to BSD if there are any patent litigations. And now people are complaining.

Because it is them saying, "We can take all of your patents, but if you sue us for it, then you don't get to use this."

IANAL. I think that is a common misunderstanding of the clause. If you sue them for react patents you can still use HHVM, or vice versa.

https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/react-facebook-and-the-revok...

Not even close to true

Exactly like React - means the language will be abandoned by wider community. The Facebook peeps are gradually building themselves into corporate self-invented mono-culture.

I'd like to see any concrete numbers on this. I'm seeing React getting stronger and stronger in my area, and patent worries are mostly accepted as crazy hypotheticals.

Wordpress are just starting what could easily be a multi-year rewrite as a result and Drupal has specifically excluded React from evaluation - both on the basis of the patent issues

True, but PHP development has always been split from the rest of the web-dev community.

React has managed to bring together people in C#, Python, Ruby, and Erlang to name a few languages... who all previously used different frameworks, or just jQuery.

Yes, it is clearly in wordpress' best interests to spend all that time and money to preserve their very important right to sue facebook for violating wordpress' software patents in the future.

/sarcasm

Do you work with any lawyers in your company or peer group? I doubt they view the patent issue as "crazy hypotheticals".

The only lawyers I know with software patent experience consider the fuss absolutely rediculous.

It gives you more rights. Full stop, end of story.

So would I. But patents scare people, and rightly so.

This is a multi horse race and even if you are not scared of patents it might be unwise to bet on the horse you think will scare other people. (Case in point, Wordpress.)

Anyone who would wield the bullshit that is a software patent against facebook in a lawsuit deserves to lose licenses to everything.

Fact of the matter is, it's just posturing. Software patents are utter bullshit and the facebook license clause reflects this.

I have met very few people personally who are turned off by the patents thing. The only valid concern would be if your company has (or might have) patents which they might sue Facebook over. More interesting companies could conflict with this, but clearly many React users don't have a problem.

Woah. Its bad enough with react which many did not expect. Now also this BS. No thanks really.

Thanks; we don't feel that the framework authors have to make a choice here:

- short-term, those of us working on HHVM - not the frameworks - need to make sure that HHVM can run the frameworks that Hack developers require

- long-term, we expect Hack and HHVM to continue to diverge from PHP; it's unlikely that targeting both HHVM and PHP will be a practical long-term strategy

PHP packages are dropping HHVM support right and left right now because HHVM has already been… lagging in its PHP support.

So there's not really a choice to make. HHVM was tiny anyway.

Laravel dropped HHVM support a year ago, and i'm sure many other CMS's / frameworks have either followed suit (if they ever supported it) or will soon.

I can't imagine any large framework spliting or supporting this in place of php 7. This is more of a new beginning with new hack frameworks.