PHP 7.3’s First Release Candidate is Here

PHP 7.3 is inching closer to general release (planned for December), with today’s announcement of the first PHP 7.3 release candidate:

The PHP team is glad to announce the release of the next PHP 7.3.0 pre-release, PHP 7.3.0RC1. The rough outline of the PHP 7.3 release cycle is specified in the PHP Wiki: https://wiki.php.net/todo/php73

Here’s the remaining timeline leading up to the general release of PHP 7.3:

• Sep 27 2018 – RC 2
• Oct 11 2018 – RC 3
• Oct 25 2018 – RC 4
• Nov 8 2018 – RC 5
• Nov 20 2018 – PHP 7.3.0 branched
• Nov 22 2018 – RC 6
• Dec 13 2018 – GA

Along with the new release candidate, releases for all minor versions of PHP 7 are available as of September 13th. The new releases include a security fix:

It's release day! This one has a security fix, so be sure to pick it up!

PHP 7.0.32: https://t.co/y6CYJTkgMz
PHP 7.1.22: https://t.co/TglWh6cqU2
PHP 7.2.10: https://t.co/wsorZY0I6P

And most excitingly, 7.3 enters release candidate stage!
PHP 7.3.0RC1: https://t.co/kMkg1RR17v

— php.net (@official_php) September 13, 2018

If you haven’t read much on PHP 7.3 yet, here are the highlight features coming to PHP 7.3:

• 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

Considering that it was almost three years between the release of PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4, the pace of about one minor PHP 7 release annually is encouraging to the growth of PHP as a language. Now, if they could only give us arrow functions…