Upcoming PHP 7.4 and PHP 8.0: What features do you hope to add?

PHP 7.4 is expected to be released by the end of November 2019. PHP 8.0 announced for release in 2020. Five experts reveal their wish list for upcoming PHP releases.

PHP 7.4 is in its infancy - PHP 8.0 was announced in 2020 on the occasion of the upcoming 25th anniversary of the programming language. Experts Ralf Eggert, Marcel Normann, Sebastian Feldman, Arne Blankerts and Sebastian Bergmann answer what features announced for PHP 7.4 caught their attention and what they want from PHP 8.0 in the second part of the PHP Expert Checkup.

PHP 7.4 is scheduled to be released in November 2019

Developer: PHP 7.4 will be released at the end of November: Which new feature particularly caught your attention and why?

Ralf Eggert: I'm happy that PHP has reached another level with version 7.4, which makes the language even better. I don't really want to highlight any special features, and I think every new version since version 7.0 is another step towards better PHP.

Ralf Eggert is the Managing Director of Travello GmbH, has written several books on Zend Framework, and has also been named an Alexa Champion by Amazon. Ralf has been working in PHP since 1998 and enjoys sharing his experience at conferences.

If I should highlight something, my choice would depend on the typed attribute. This is just the last building block missing type safety.

Marcel Normann: Preloading is probably the most exciting construction site out there. But more importantly to me, it's a springboard for PHP 8.

Marcel Normann is Head of Software Development at WhereGroup in Bonn. He has been working as a developer since 1999 and has been working with PHP for over 15 years. He spends his free time beekeeping, jogging and odd firefighting jobs instead of using a computer.

Sebastian Bergmann: Obviously: the type that can finally declare properties. This removes another white spot from the mapping of PHP's type system.

Sebastian Bergmann is an open source guy from the first hour. As the creator of the PHPUnit testing tool, he created an industry standard and made significant contributions to the professionalization of software development using PHP. As co-founder and principal consultant of PHP Consulting (www.thePHP.cc), he has helped successfully develop and operate software.

Arne Blankerts: From a language perspective, the most important feature is obviously the introduction of optional attribute types. In this case, all that's missing is a list or set of types, and the world would be nearly perfect.

Arne Blankerts is the co-founder of PHP Consulting Principal Consultants (www.thePHP.cc), helping companies successfully develop and operate software. He is the author and maintainer of various open source development tools and regularly speaks at professional conferences.

The new preloading feature is not a language feature and is very exciting, it is a way to inject PHP code directly into the cache on startup, thus avoiding all I/O and Recompile during execution. Features primarily used in conjunction with the new FFI (Foreign Function Interface), making it possible to use external libraries even without existing PHP extensions with equally meaningful performance.

Sebastian Feldmann: On the one hand, of course, further progress in typing, in the case of 7.4, "typing properties" and improved "Type Difference". Typing only helps develop more stable software. On the other hand, I have a lot of expectations for the new "preload" feature, which allows code to be preloaded into memory. The benchmarks I've seen so far show about a 10% increase in maturity. I'm curious how this translates to our application.

Sebastian Feldmann lives in Munich and Cologne and provides software development support to the CHECK24 team. He has approximately 20 years of experience in PHP, specializing in enterprise web applications. Sebastian is an open source contributor and maintainer of the PHP backup utility phpbu, and a git-hook library called Captain Hook.

What's new in PHP 8.0

Developer: PHP 8.0 will be released next year. What is your personal wish list for upcoming major releases? Which feature is missing?

Ralf Eggert: Most importantly, I'm very excited about the further performance improvements announced and whether they actually deliver on their promise. Performance optimization is always a pleasure.

I'm curious about what happens next anyway!

Marcel Normann: If I can use FFI and asynchronous workloads so I don't have to write any notes, that would be a nice leap.

In addition to this release, I would also say that you can't forget about framework-less PHP: years of small service operability without major breaking changes may also lead to new interest from the corporate world. At this point, I refer to Go's success over and over again: the desire for simplicity and a "mediating" language. Most of the ingredients are already in the PHP world, you just need to merge them.

Sebastian Bergmann: There are a few final white spots on PHP's type system diagram: I would be happy with typed arrays, generics and union types. At least for the latter, I'm assuming they will do it in PHP 8.

Arne Blankerts: In addition to the list of types already mentioned, I would like to first give some aging extensions (such as DOM extensions) a thorough overhaul. Even with just a handful of efforts here, the libxml2 library has a staggering number of open source DOM implementations in the world, and development using PHP is pretty dead. Modernization will come with some effort to connect, as you may have to connect a new backend. On the other hand, I find it shameful that the available DOM extensions for home languages ​​using the web still don't really handle HTML 5. But hope faded for the last time.

Sebastian Feldmann: Current projects like ReactPHP can help develop "non-blocking" applications in PHP, but native support for async functionality would be very exciting. The last few years have shown that PHP is on the right track. So whatever the final version 8 is, I believe it will keep the language moving forward and keep it relevant.

This article is a translated article, the original English address:

https://entwickler.de/online/php/php-7-4-php-8-0-expertencheck -teil2-579912332.html