PHP 8.2 RC1 Released With Various Fixes & Improvements

After a series of alpha and beta releases over the past several months, out this past week is the first release candidate of the upcoming PHP 8.2.

PHP 8.2 RC1 brings various bug fixes, including possible crash fixes, over the earlier alpha/beta release milestones. The PHP CLI's built-in web server has also implemented various improvements to its handling of static resources.

Earlier PHP 8.2 development builds added support for defining constants in traits, extension-specific Exceptions/Errors in the Random code, updated MIME type table for the built-in web server, reduced memory footprint of strings returned by various functions, initial support for JIT performance profiling generation for macOS Instrument, new Random extension, enabling arc4random_buf for Linux with Glibc 2.36+ for random bytes, initial support for cross-building on Windows for ARM64, allocating the JIT buffer Opcache close to the PHP .text segment to allow using direct IP-relative calls and jumps, new options for PHP Sockets, support for new Curl options, new ZipArchive methods, and other performance improvements.

More details on the PHP 8.2 Release Candidate 1 changes via PHP.net.

At least five more release candidates are expected over the weeks ahead while the PHP 8.2.0 GA release is expected around 24 November.