PHP 8.0 is here! It has been 5 years since PHP released a new major version. In this article, we want to share with you the less technical benefits of the new PHP release.
The upgrade to PHP 8.0
With any major release, it is in principle permissible to make breaking changes from the previous version. This new version introduces relatively few breaking changes to the programming language. It means that if you kept your PHP versions up-to-date before, upgrading to PHP 8 will be a lot smoother than upgrading from PHP 5 to PHP 7.
PHP is 25 years old, so it is actually a pretty old programming language. Every major upgrade involves work on old code, such as making it more consistent. In this release, work was done to improve conversion and comparisons from text to number. This means that if your application receives numbers in a text format, PHP will be more consistent in converting these strings into usable numbers. This more consistent way of converting, will result in fewer extraneous “bugs.” In addition, highly optimized sorting functions have been implemented. This means, for example, that items that have the same value will always be in the same order than before they were sorted.
It will enable your developers to yield better code quality, resulting in fewer bugs!
Kenny Rassin
In addition, this new version comes with a host of new technical features. Most of those new features are opt-in syntactic improvements and additions, added types, new functions, shorter ways to do the same thing.... This is very technical, but in short, it will allow your developers to deliver better code quality, resulting in fewer bugs.
The 7.0 release came with a huge performance boost. The PHP 8.0 release has a new opt-in feature called “Just In-time Parser” (JIT). Depending on the type of application you write, this can result in another performance boost. The effects of JIT are not always noticeable in regular PHP web applications for various technical reasons. We recommend testing out the new JIT settings and see if this feature has a positive effect on your application!
What about older PHP versions?
A side effect of the 8.0 PHP release is that support for PHP <7.2 will disappear and PHP 7.3 will only get security patches. The only actively supported versions will be PHP 7.4 and PHP 8.0! This is exciting because it means that we can use almost all previously introduced type optimizations in any project without having to look back to older PHP versions! This will have a huge positive effect on the overall code quality and stability of any PHP project.
Currently, the PHP community is working hard to get all packages (such as Magento, Symfony, Laravel, etc.) PHP 8.0 compatible. Most of this work is done voluntarily by random people on the Internet. If you want to help: there are many people looking for a sponsor to work on their open source packages!
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