Everything You Need to Know About the Major PHP 8.0 Update (2020)

(NOTE- This post was created in 2020 and PHP 8.0 is now depreciated)

dev2host supports PHP 8.0. We are still provisioning our web hosting packackes with PHP 7.4. If you would like to use PHP 8.0, login to your cPanel and navigate to “PHP Selector”. You can change your PHP version and modules.

On November 26th 2020, the PHP development team announced their newest release of PHP 8.0;

“PHP 8.0 is a major update of the PHP language. It contains many new features and optimizations including named arguments, union types, attributes, constructor property promotion, match expression, null safe operator, JIT, and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency.”

With over 25 new features, breaking changes and performance improvements, PHP 8.0 will allow for “better performance, better syntax, and improved type safety.” (PHP.net)

The PHP 8.0 update includes the following new features:

Named Arguments RFC
Attributes RFC Doc
Constructor Property Promotion RFC Doc
Union Types RFC Doc
Match Expression RFC Doc
Nullsafe Operator RFC
Saner String to Number Comparisons RFC
Consistent Type Errors for Internal Functions RFC
Just-In-Time Compilation: Tracing JIT and Function JIT are the two compilation engines that have been introduced with the new update. Tracing JIT: performs about 3x better on synthetic benchmarks and a 1.5–2x improvement on specific long-running applications.

In addition to these new features, the PHP 8 Update includes type system and error handling improvements including:

Stricter type checks for arithmetic/bitwise operators RFC
Abstract trait method validation RFC
Correct signatures of magic methods RFC
Reclassified engine warnings RFC
Fatal error for incompatible method signatures RFC
The @ operator no longer silences fatal errors
Inheritance with private methods RFC
Mixed type RFC
Static return type RFC
Types for internal functions Email thread
Opaque objects instead of resources for Curl, Gd, Sockets, OpenSSL, XMLWriter, and XML extensions

Other syntax adjustments and improvements on the update include:

Allow a trailing comma in parameter lists RFC and closure use lists RFC
Non-capturing catches RFC
Variable Syntax Tweaks RFC
Treat namespaced names as single token RFC
Throw is now an expression RFC
Allow ::class on objects RFC

The last part of the update provides new classes, interfaces, and functions including:

Weak Map class
Stringable interface
str_contains(), str_starts_with(), str_ends_with()
fdiv()
get_debug_type()
get_resource_id()
token_get_all() object implementation

With the extensive new features, updates, and breaking changes, it’s likely changes will need to be made in your code to ensure it’s running properly with the new version. For more information on PHP 8.0, visit the official announcement on the PHP website

Source: https://www.php.net/releases/8.0/en.php