The PHP team announced yesterday that the release of the first PHP 7.3.0 version—Alpha 1—is available. This starts the PHP 7.3 release cycle which is based on PHP 7.2.
The pace of the PHP 7 release cycle is a significant plus for developers and moving the language forward at a quickened pace. We can expect v7.3.0 to land sometime around November 29 based on the timetable for this release.
A couple of highlight features that are coming to PHP 7.3 include:
- Trailing Commas in function calls
- JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR flag for json_encode() and json_decode()
- Flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc syntax
- An is_countable() function
- list() reference assignment
To get the latest news and insider information about the next version of PHP, I recommend that you watch Rasmus Lerdorf’s talk PHP in 2018. He discusses a brief history of PHP and performance improvements in PHP 7, among other exciting PHP 7.3 topics.
For more information on yesterday’s release, check out the official PHP.net announcement and the UPGRADING document on GitHub. You should not use this version for production; it’s an early test version.
The next release, Alpha 2, is planned for June 21, and the first beta coming next month on July 19th.
