PHP Releases

PHP 8.5 shipped November 20th. Two features define this release: the pipe operator and the URI extension. They solve different problems, but both share the same motivation: making common operations less awkward to express. The pipe operator Functional pipelines in PHP have always been a mess. Chaining transformations meant either nesting function calls inside out, or breaking them into intermediate variables: // before — read right to left $result = array_sum(array_map('strlen', array_filter($strings, 'strlen'))); // or verbose but readable $filtered = array_filter($strings, 'strlen'); $lengths = array_map('strlen', $filtered); $result = array_sum($lengths); // after — read left to right $result = $strings |> array_filter(?, 'strlen') |> array_map('strlen', ?) |> array_sum(?); The |> operator passes the left-hand value into the right-hand expression. The ? placeholder marks where it goes. Pipelines now read in the order operations happen: left to right, top to bottom. ...

PHP 8.4 released November 21st. Property hooks are the feature. Everything else, and there’s quite a bit of it, is secondary. Property hooks For twenty years, if you wanted behavior on property access in PHP you had to write getters and setters: class User { private string $_name; public function getName(): string { return $this->_name; } public function setName(string $name): void { $this->_name = strtoupper($name); } } PHP 8.4 adds hooks directly on the property: class User { public string $name { set(string $name) { $this->name = strtoupper($name); } } } You can define get and set hooks independently. A property with only a get hook is computed on access: ...

PHP 8.3 landed November 23rd. Quiet release by PHP standards: no enum-sized shift, no JIT. What it does have is a focused set of improvements that close long-standing gaps in the type system and add functions that should have existed years ago. Typed class constants Class constants have been untyped since their introduction. PHP 8.3 fixes that: interface HasVersion { const string VERSION; } class App implements HasVersion { const string VERSION = '1.0.0'; } Without typed constants, an interface constant could be overridden with a completely different type in an implementing class and nothing would complain. Typed constants close that gap, and on interface-driven codebases the impact is immediate. ...

PHP 8.2 dropped December 8th. Readonly classes are the headline. The deprecation of dynamic properties is the one that actually requires your attention. Dynamic properties deprecated PHP has always allowed adding properties to objects that weren’t declared in the class: class User {} $user = new User(); $user->name = 'Alice'; // no declaration, no error... until now In 8.2, this triggers a deprecation notice. In PHP 9.0 it becomes a fatal error. The grace period exists, but the migration clock is running. ...

PHP 8.1 released November 25th. It follows 8.0’s sweeping overhaul with something different: fewer features, but each one thought through rather than bolted on. Enums This is the one that changes codebases the moment you upgrade. Before 8.1, PHP enumerations were either class constants, strings, or integers with nothing enforcing them: // before: nothing stops Status::INVALID from being passed const ACTIVE = 'active'; const INACTIVE = 'inactive'; // after enum Status: string { case Active = 'active'; case Inactive = 'inactive'; } function activate(Status $status): void { ... } PHP enums are objects, not scalars. They support methods, interfaces, and constants. Backed enums (with a string or int value) serialize cleanly and map to database columns naturally. Pure enums (no backing type) enforce domain concepts without worrying about serialization. ...

PHP 8.0 shipped November 26th. I’ve been running it for six weeks on a side project and a greenfield service at work. It’s the most significant PHP release since 7.0, and in some ways more impactful, because the changes pile on top of each other in useful ways. JIT The Just-In-Time compiler was the headline announcement. The reality in production is more nuanced: for typical web apps (database queries, HTTP calls, template rendering) the gains are modest, because those workloads are I/O bound, not compute bound. Where JIT actually shines is CPU-intensive code: image manipulation, data transformation, mathematical computation. ...

PHP 7.4 landed November 28th. It’s the last 7.x release before PHP 8.0, and it feels like it. The features are substantial enough to stand on their own, but they also read as groundwork for what’s coming. Typed properties This is the one. Since PHP 7.0, you could type function parameters and return values. But class properties? Still untyped: class User { public int $id; public string $name; public ?DateTimeInterface $deletedAt; } 7.4 changes that. Typed properties enforce types at assignment, not just at call sites. Classes become self-documenting in a way that docblocks never quite managed, and the engine catches type errors before they propagate through half your stack. ...

PHP 7.3 shipped December 6th. No single killer feature. It’s a collection of quality-of-life improvements that individually feel minor but together make daily work noticeably less annoying. Flexible heredoc and nowdoc Until 7.3, the closing marker of a heredoc had to be at column zero. That forced awkward de-indentation in otherwise well-formatted code: // before $html = <<<HTML <div> <p>Hello</p> </div> HTML; // had to be at column 0, ugly // after $html = <<<HTML <div> <p>Hello</p> </div> HTML; The closing marker can now be indented to match the surrounding code, and that indentation is stripped from the content. This looks cosmetic. It’s not. Heredocs in nested contexts (class methods, conditionals) were visually jarring before. Now they fit. ...

PHP 7.2 released November 30th. The headline isn’t a language feature, it’s a removal. mcrypt is gone. This is good news, even if it doesn’t feel that way when you’re the one migrating. The mcrypt problem mcrypt has been unmaintained since 2007. More than a decade of stagnation in a cryptography library. It was deprecated in 7.1, and 7.2 removes it entirely. The replacement is sodium, now bundled as a core extension. ...

PHP 7.1 shipped December 1st. No 2x performance headline, no engine rewrite. It fills in the gaps that 7.0 left in the type system, and those gaps were genuinely annoying. Nullable types 7.0 let you declare string $name as a parameter type. What it didn’t let you do was say “this can also be null”. You had to drop the type hint entirely or hack around it. 7.1 adds ? prefix: ...