PHP 8.1 Alpha Releases Get Underway With Enums, Fsync, Fibers, More Performance
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PHP 8.1 is another big release after last year's PHP 8.0 evolution. Among the changes that have been worked on in recent months for PHP 8.1 include:
- Enums (Enumerations) for PHP are finally in place.
- PHP 8.1 supports an fsync() function to help ensure the operating system has written out data/metadata changes to the underlying storage. Similarly is an fsyncdata() function for just ensuring the data but not necessarily the metadata has been synced.
- Support for Fibers to improve asynchronous support in PHP. PHP Fibers allow PHP functions to now be interruptible without polluting the call stack and for supporting transparent non-blocking I/O implementations of existing interfaces.
- Transitioning of more PHP resources into objects.
- PHP-FPM now supports process renaming on macOS.
- Support for MurmurHash V3 and xxHash with the PHP hashing interface.
- PHP Sodium now supports the XChaCha20 stream cipher functions and Ristretto255 functions.
- PHP's OPcache now has an inheritance cache.
- Continued performance optimizations.
Last week marked the PHP 8.1 Alpha 2 release a short time after Alpha 1 while their RSS feed was down to spot the new releases in a more timely manner. Those wanting to help in testing of the PHP 8.1 Alpha releases can find them at PHP.net.
PHP 8.1 Alpha 3 is expected next week followed by the feature freeze later in July. After that freeze will be three betas getting us through mid-August while the many release candidates kick off at the start of September. PHP 8.1 is aiming for release by the end of November.
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