As part of an ongoing effort to improve compatibility across all supported versions of PHP (currently 5.6.20–7.4), several tooling additions and improvements have been made during the 5.5 cycle.
A large handful of changes were made to address the findings from these tools. Below are some that you need to be aware of.
Automated PHP compatibility scanning
During the WordPress 5.3 cycle, a new job was added to Core’s Travis-CI builds to scan for potential PHP compatibility issues using the PHPCompatibilityWP PHPCS ruleset (see #46152). However, because the scan was reporting a large number of potential issues, it was placed