Add trend tracking for metrics over time

[dereuromark]

Overview

Track how framework metrics change over time/versions to see improvements or regressions.

Proposed Implementation

1. Store historical snapshots

reports/
├── data/           # Current run
├── history/
│   ├── 2025-11-30/
│   │   ├── phpstan_cakephp.json
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── 2025-12-15/
│   └── ...

2. Track key metrics per version

// reports/history/index.json
{
  "cakephp": [
    {"date": "2025-11-30", "version": "5.2.9", "phpstan": 16, "psalm": 3095},
    {"date": "2025-12-15", "version": "5.2.10", "phpstan": 12, "psalm": 2980}
  ]
}

3. Generate trend table in report

## PHPStan Trends

| Framework | Nov 2025 | Dec 2025 | Change |
|-----------|----------|----------|--------|
| CakePHP   | 16       | 12       | -25%   |
| Laravel   | 11782    | 11500    | -2%    |

Implementation Options

Approach	Effort	Notes
Manual snapshots	Low	Run monthly, commit history folder
GitHub Actions	Medium	Auto-run on schedule, store in repo
Separate index.json	Medium	Append to index each run

Value

• See if frameworks are improving type safety over time
• Compare version-to-version progress
• Spot regressions after major releases

[dereuromark]

Additional: Historical analysis

Should also support analyzing past versions of frameworks, not just tracking from now forward.

Approach

1. For each framework, identify major releases per year (e.g., via git tags)
2. Checkout each historical version and run analysis
3. Build a timeline going back several years

Example output

## PHPStan Errors Over Time

| Framework   | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|-------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| CakePHP | 342  | 185  | 89   | 45   | 22   | 16   |
| Laravel| 8500 | 9200 | 10100| 11000| 11500| 11782|
| Symfony | 120  | 85   | 42   | 15   | 5    | 2    |

Implementation

# For each framework, get yearly tags
git tag --list 'v4.*' --sort=-v:refname | head -1  # latest 4.x
git tag --list 'v3.*' --sort=-v:refname | head -1  # latest 3.x

# Checkout and analyze
git checkout v4.0.0
php check_phpstan/run_all.php

This would show the long-term trend of type safety adoption in the PHP ecosystem.

[dereuromark]

How to run it yourself

# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/php-collective/framework-comparison.git
cd framework-comparison

# Install dependencies
composer install

# Run all checks (clones frameworks, runs PHPStan, Psalm, phploc, etc.)
php run_all.php

# Or run individual checks
php check_phpstan/run_all.php
php check_psalm/run_all.php
php check_phploc/run_all.php
php check_cognitive/run_all.php
php check_silenced/run_all.php

# Regenerate report from existing JSON data
php generate_report.php

Results are saved to reports/README.md and raw JSON data to reports/data/.

Note: First run takes a while as it clones all framework repos and installs their dependencies.