PHP 8.0 JIT Is Offering Very Compelling Performance Ahead Of Its Alpha

With the PHP 8.0 schedule putting the first alpha release for the middle of June, I've been trying out its latest Git state in recent days for looking at its performance as well as when enabling its brand new JIT (Just In Time) compiler support that is new to PHP8. The results are quite compelling and here are metrics going back to the days of PHP 5.4 for comparison.

PHP 8.0 Alpha 1 is scheduled for release on 18 June followed by at least two more alpha releases before the PHP 8.0 feature freeze at the end of July. Following that is a number of betas and release candidates over the following months until the project will hopefully ship PHP 8.0.0 on 3 December of this year.

The new JIT compiler support is the biggest change with PHP 8.0 but there is also other features being worked on like support for a new static return type, union types, attributes, an str_contains() function for at long last having an easier way for checking if a substring is in a string without using the likes of strpos(), and much more.

For today's pre-alpha testing is using the latest PHP 8.0 Git as of this past weekend benchmarked against the current stable releases of each major series going back to PHP 5.4. This includes benchmarking PHP 7.4.6, 7.3.18, 7.2.31, 7.1.33, 7.0.33, 5.6.39, 5.5.38, and 5.4.44. All PHP releases were built in the same manner with the same compiler on the same system and using the same PHP configuration file (obviously sans the final run of enabling the PHP JIT in a "1235" configuration). More details on the PHP JIT implementation can be found on PHP.net.

Here are several different benchmarks from PHP 5.4 to PHP 8.0 Git looking solely at the PHP performance outside of the context of any web server for looking just at the PHP performance using the Phoronix Test Suite.