Language & runtime Survey
The PHP ecosystem does not wait for a new release — but it does not declare support either
After a PHP release ships, when do the 500 most-installed Composer packages declare that they support it, and how much does that declaration actually say?
Finding
43.5% of installs arrive on a constraint with no upper bound at all — `symfony/console` says `>=8.4.1` today, which claims support for PHP 12 as well. Of the 280 packages that do close the top, 247 made the commitment before the version existed: `guzzlehttp/guzzle` covered 8.4 in October 2020, four years early. That leaves 33 packages that genuinely waited, at a median of 325 days. The raw medians fall version over version and read as an ecosystem speeding up; restricted to an equal observation window the trend reverses (238 → 215 → 325 days).
checked yesterday