A sneak peek at PHP 8.4

MergePHP July 2024

Ian Littman

@ian@phpc.social / @iansltx

https://ian.im/php84amerge

The Alpha is out

• Thanks to release managers Eric Mann, Calvin Buckley, and Saki Takamachi
• Feature freeze on August 13
• Release targeted for November 21
• More info on the wiki
• Release schedule/support timelines have recently changed

What we'll cover

• Where to get it now
• What's new
• What's deprecated/removed/BC-broken

Blue-highlighted items are links if you want more info

Info drawn from php.watch + UPGRADING and NEWS files

How do I get it?

• macOS

  • brew tap shivammathur/php

  • brew install php@8.4

• Red Hat-based: use Remi's repo
• Inside Docker: e.g. php:8.4.0alpha1-fpm-alpine3.20
• Source code to build yourself is on php.net

WARNING: This is an alpha. Don't deploy this to production.

New Features + Improvements

Property Hooks

class User implements Named
{
    private bool $isModified = false;
    public function __construct(private string $first, private string $last){}
    public string $fullName {
        // Override the "read" action with arbitrary logic.
        get => $this->first . " " . $this->last;
 
        // Override the "write" action with arbitrary logic.
        set { 
            [$this->first, $this->last] = explode(' ', $value, 2);
            $this->isModified = true;
        }
    }
}

New array Functions

• array_find - first value in array for which callback returns true
• array_find_key - first key in array for which callback returns true
• array_all - whether callback returns true for all items
• array_any - whether callback returns true for at least one item
• Polyfill via polyfills/array-find

Date improvements

• ->getMicrosecond()/setMicrosecond()
• ::createFromTimestamp()
• Available on DateTime/DateTimeImmutable
• NOT in DateTimeInterface

Security

• Sodium supports AEGIS-128L/AEGIS256
• tempnam() filenames are now 13 bytes longer
• bcrypt default cost is now 12, up from 10
• OpenSSL Curve25519/Curve448 support (including ed25519)

NumberS!

• Rounding
  • bcceil, bcfloor, bcround
  • New rounding modes in round() and Intl NumberFormatter::round()
  • Slightly better max precision (by one digit)
• BCMath is now faster
• fpow() method for IEEE 754 compliant raising-to-a-power

String manipulation

• grapheme_str_split - like mb_str_split but language semantics aware
• mb_ucfirst()/mb_lcfirst()
• mb_trim()/mb_ltrim()/mb_rtrtim()

DOM

• HTML5 parsing/serialization
• Living spec opt-in
• DOMNode::DOCUMENT_POSITION_*
• ...and more!

Other additions

• new Foo->bar() now works (previously needed to be (new Foo)->bar())
• #[\Deprecated] attribute
• http_(get|clear)_last_response_headers (for e.g. file_get_contents via HTTP)
• feature_list array key in curl_version() response
• request_parse_body() (returns [$looks_like_POST, $looks_like_FILES])
• PHP integer size in phpinfo
• More info in Closure::__debugInfo() (and names tweaked for better visibility)
• PDO driver-specific SQL parsers and driver-specific subclasses
• Various Postgres client improvements (in the PGSQL extension)
• Various Reflection improvements
• SplObjectStorage::seek(): SeekableIterator
• XMLReader/Writer operation on streams
• Various performance improvements

Exceptions/input validation

• dom
• Intl
• mb_*
• pcntl
• SimpleXML
• SplFixedArray out of bounds
• XMLReader/XMLWriter
• XSL
• round() on invalid mode
• xml_set_*_handler()

Resources -> Types

• BCMath numbers (RFC accepted, not yet implemented)
• ODBC connections and results
• SoapClient Url, Sdl (and typemap is now an array)
  • Bonus: Clark Notation support
• StreamBucket
• More typed constants
  • Date
  • Intl
  • PDO
  • Spl
  • Sqlite
  • XMLReader
  • PHP_DEBUG, PHP_ZTS (now bools)

• JIT is enabled based on a flag rather than buffer size
• PHP will now exit if JIT is enabled and fails to init
• Opcache interned string buffer default is 8x larger

JIT/Opcache

PCRE2 is now on version 10.44

• Core -> PECL
  • OCI8, PDO-OCI
  • IMAP
  • Pspell
• PHP built-in web server recursively falls back to index.php more aggressively
• PCRE is now updated (changes behavior)
• SimpleXML now doesn't reset the iterator in a few cases
• strcspn() now doesn't bug out when it sees a null byte
• Newer openssl, curl requirements

Other BC Breaks

• Implicitly nullable parameter declarations aka (string $foo = null)
• session_set_save_handler() with callables rather than SessionHandlerInterface
• CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER (was a no-op anyway)
• Passing PHP session ID via URL parameter rather than cookie (and URL rewriting to include session IDs)
• DatePeriod::__construct() (use DatePeriod::createFromISO8601String())
• ldap_connect() with more than 2 arguments, ldap_exop() with more than 4
• Escaped question marks in PDO_PGSQL inside dollar-quoted strings
• Various PgSQL methods with omitted row arg (pass null instaed)
• ReflectionMethod::__construct() with one argument
• stream_context_set_option() with two arguments

Deprecations

Thanks! Questions?

• This talk: ian.im/php84amerge
• GitHub: github.com/iansltx
• Fediverse: phpc.social/@ian
• Twitter: @iansltx