PHP 7.3 Enters Feature Freeze & Releases Beta

The end of July marked the code branching and feature freeze for PHP 7.3 followed by the creation of the first beta.

PHP 7.3 introduces a net_get_interfaces() function to enumerate detected network adapters in a cross-platform manner, adds is_countable() for determining if a variable can be counted, drops support for BeOS, adds WebP support for the GD image create from string function, updates against a newer SQLite library, improves PHP garbage collection performance, and a lot of bug fixes.

Our early PHP 7.3 benchmarks are looking quite positive and it's great to see PHP7 performance getting even faster. As the PHP 7.3.0 release nears, we'll be back with more performance benchmarks.

The PHP 7.3 Beta 1 release offers up a handful of new bug fixes ranging from taking care of memory leaks to segmentation faults.

PHP 7.3 Beta 1 will be followed by two more betas over the course of August followed by at least six release candidates over the next few months prior to officially introducing PHP 7.3.0 in December.

More details on PHP 7.3 Beta 1 can be found via PHP.net.