News / September 14, 2018

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…