PHP 7.3 Alpha Released With New Features

PHP 7.3 Alpha 1 is available today as the PHP developers kick off their next release cycle for getting this next version of PHP7 out by the end of 2018.

PHP developers plan on at least three alphas and three betas to get through August and then at least six release candidates happening every two weeks. After that all happens, PHP developers feel PHP 7.3.0 should be ready for release by the end of November.

In digging through the NEWS work-in-progress change-log, the highlights that caught my attention at this stage of development are:

- A net_get_interfaces() function to enumerate network adapters cross platforms.

- An is_countable() function was added.

- Dropped support for BeOS.

- Support for references in list() and array destructing.

- WebP support within GD's imagecreatefromstring().

- Updating against libsqlite 3.24.

- Improved PHP garbage collection.

- A wide variety of bug fixes.

More details on PHP 7.3 Alpha 1 are available from PHP.net.