PHP 8.0 Alpha 1 Released - Running Faster And With New Features

PHP 8.0 Alpha 1 was just released as the first development snapshot for this major PHP programming language update due to ship around the end of November.

Most notable with PHP 8.0 is the just-in-time (JIT) support and other performance improvements to accelerate the already increasingly speedy PHP7 compared to the sluggish PHP5 days. Earlier this month I ran some PHP 8.0 benchmarks including JIT too and in both modes PHP 8.0 is shaping up to be faster than prior PHP releases. I'll have some more numbers out soon.

Additionally for other material in PHP 8.0 Alpha 1:

- The much talked about PHP JIT support is available and continues to be refined.

- JSON support is now considered a core piece of PHP and cannot be disabled. Due to JSON data being so common, PHP developers voted to ensure JSON support is always available.

- Changes to PHP GD library, including objects now used in place of GD resource, a new imagegetinterpolation() function, and dropping deprecated WBMP functions.

- Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS) support in PHP's OpenSSL code.

- Many improvements to the PHP Zip extension including for setting new callbacks in conjunction with recent libzip releases, a replace file method, compression/encryption options for addGlob/addPattern, and other changes.

- Many bug fixes in core PHP code as well as other extensions.

There still are two more alpha releases before the feature freeze that is anticipated to start around early August so there still is another month worth of features that can be introduced. PHP 8.0.0 is aiming to be released at the end of November following many release candidates over late summer and autumn. The PHP 8.0 Alpha 1 announcement can be read on PHP.net.