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Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

"We also dropped support for Windows XP and 2003."

Well, that sucks. And everybody was laughing/bitching/both at MS for dropping support for them with VS 2012.

Windows is really a second class citizen in the PHP world, I imagine that there are very few live deployments of PHP on Windows servers.

I doubt that, I know of a few companies running PHP on Azure because they like it and others running PHP on Windows servers because their IT dept refuses to support Linux.

I've never experienced this. I've spent years of my life developing on PHP on Windows (and mostly, but not only, deploying on Linux). I've never got the impression that Windows is 2nd class like it is for Python.

It comes with well working Apache and IIS bindings by default; the Windows package contains a large number of compiled extensions; a fair set of Windows-specific extensions are enabled by default (including support for COM and .NET interfacing, for instance); command-line PHP (for e.g. Composer or Symfony) works just fine; most if not all posix-ish builtin functions have good Windows implementations.

Also, the built-in HTTP server that was added in PHP 5.4 works just fine on Windows. Really, I have no idea what you're talking about.

That said, I've never looked into whether PHP is as performant or secure on Windows.

I suppose it depends on which subset of functions you are using.

I developed a PHP app on Windows which did mailsending, push notifications (APE) and UTF8 encoding. All of these things behaved differently between operating systems.

"behave differently between operating systems" != "Windows is not as well supported"

Mail sending? Hmm, curious. Sure, there's STMP-settings in php.ini vs sendmail, but that can't be a show stopper, right? Also, PEAR::Mail did the rest for me, back in the days. I'm sure there's even better options these days.

I'm also curious how UTF8 was different. After all, since PHP arrays are simply binary arrays, how can it be different?

That may be true for servers, but certainly not for developers, or rather the average PHP user. Think of all the WAMP installations used to setup a Wordpress page.

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