PHP 7.4 Aims For Release In Two Weeks With FFI, Performance Improvements

The sixth and final release candidate of PHP 7.4 is now available with it being on track for the general availability release before month's end.

PHP 7.4-RC6 is now available for testing with plans for the official release in just two weeks. PHP 7.4-RC6 is just comprised of fixes ranging from making stream_copy_to_stream using mmap more often to a reflection bug to TLS issues.

PHP 7.4 most notably brings FFI support for accessing C functions/structures/variables from PHP code in making it easier to interface with than having to write PHP modules. PHP 7.4 FFI support is quite interesting and we'll see what new use-cases it opens up and hopefully no security worms.

PHP 7.4 also brings a preload feature for preloading functions/classes to speed-up scripts by 30~50% on loading, various language tweaks, PHP Hash is now considered integral to PHP, TLS 1.3 support for OpenSSL streams, and continued performance improvements.

PHP 7.4 overall appears to be in good shape and I'll have out some fresh performance benchmarks of it later this month.