Removed Features

One of the most important skills that software maintainer have to master is to remove things. Only adding on new features to any software will create bloat and make the whole project increasingly hard to maintain.

Any features that get removed from PHP either have always been problematic, or they have turned problematic, or they have been unmaintained for a considerable amount of time, or are based on unmaintained third-party code. Rest assured that nobody ever will remove a feature from the PHP language to annoy its users, or randomly cause additional work for application developers. Every removed features listed in this chapter has been removed for a good reason, and usually PHP developers have been warned ahead of time through deprecation messages.

If you happen to (still) use one or more of the removed features, there is always a workaround that we will describe. When migrating to PHP 7 from some older version of PHP, the removed features listed in this chapter should be one of the first things to address, since usually the suggested workaround will already work in older PHP versions. Rather than upgrading to PHP 7 and seeing your software break, you should address removed features proactively.