The PHP Foundation
The PHP Foundation
PHP 8.3 is here! Bringing a handful of new features, performance and functionality improvements, and a healthy amount of deprecations, PHP 8.3 was released today.
PHP 8.3 will continue to receive active support for two years, followed by one year of security updates. Similar to the PHP 8.2 upgrade, the PHP 8.3 upgrade will be smooth as backward compatiblity is maintained. While some functionality is deprecated, there are no syntax, API*, and remove functionality in this release.
Some of the major new features in PHP 8.3 include support for declaring a type for class constants, improvements to support deep-cloning of readonly properties, improvements to the new Random extension introduced in PHP 8.2, new json_validate(),str_increment(), and str_decrement(), functions, and a noticeable amount of improvements in DateTime, DOM, and Intl extensions.
See the PHP 8.3 release page for what's new and changed in PHP 8.3.
(*) Note that some of the PHP core extensions now declare types for built-in class constants. This is technically a BC break in case child classes declare the same constants without type declaration, which is only supported in PHP 8.3.
PHP packages on software repositories such as Debian and Ubuntu repos maintained by Ondลej Surรฝ, Remi Collet for Fedora/RHEL/EL already contain PHP 8.3 builds ready to install.
Windows builds for PHP 8.3 are available on windows.php.net
Docker images with PHP 8.3 will also be available on Docker hub in the coming days.
The PHP 8.3 release contains over 1200 code commits from 114 awesome contributors to the php-src repository, and several more contributions to the documentation and its translations.
Contributions from the PHP Foundation members consist of over 280 commits.
During the period from the PHP 8.2 release date and today, the PHP Internals mailing list has received over 2800 emails.
PHP RFCs, where major changes to PHP are proposed, discussed, and voted on, PHP 8.3 received 23 RFCs that went to a vote, and 18 RFCs passed. This includes a number includes "catch-all" RFCs such as Deprecations for PHP 8.3, where multiple changes were voted at the same time. Out of the 23 RFCs with votes, 13 RFCs were either proposed or implemented by the PHP Foundation members.
The PHP documentation and php.net web site contributors have also made several impactful contributions to document the new features in PHP 8.3, prepare release pages, and more.
On behalf of the PHP Foundation, we take this post to thank everyone from this milestone in PHP. Your contributions to the PHP Foundation, code and documentation contributions, and several other ways of involvement and contributions help shape PHP to continue to be an exciting, feature-rich, and versatile programming language.
Thank you ๐
PHP 8.4, scheduled for the end of 2024 is already taking shape. Even at the moment PHP 8.3 is released, there are three active RFC votes, and some major changes such as JIT-IR, a brand-new HTML 5 parser in the DOM extension based on Lexbor, and Bcrypt default cost increasing already been implemented for PHP 8.4
We look forward to bringing you updates on our PHP Core Roundup series and our newsletter:
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PHP Roundup is prepared by Ayesh Karunaratne from PHP.Watch, a source for PHP News, Articles, Upcoming Changes, and more.