The PHP 8 Beta is Here

The PHP team announced the release of the first PHP 8 beta yesterday! We are still about four months from the v8.0.0, but you can start preparing for PHP 8 by learning about the new features, the upgrade path, and key dates to make sure you’re ready.

What New Features are in PHP 8?

PHP 8 expands on the language with new features focusing on the language’s object-oriented design, types, and adding missing conveniences. Here are some of the highlight features coming to PHP 8:

• Union types support
• Define Named arguments in function and method calls
• Nullsafe operator support to safely call methods on potentially null values
• The Match Expression
• Constructor property promotion to reduce boilerplate around defining and assigning properties during an object’s construction
• Changing the throw statement into a throw expression
• A new Stringable interface for classes that implement __toString()
• Support for static return type

Check out the upgrading document for the complete list of new features.

Timeline

This release kicks off the feature freeze portion of the PHP 8 release cycle. We’ll see a few more betas, five release candidates, and finally the general availability release on November 26, 2020:

Learn More

The following list of resources has everything you need to learn more about the upcoming releases:

• The UPGRADING document includes backward-incompatible changes, new features, and everything else you’ll need to familiarize yourself with changes in PHP 8.
• THh NEWS document has detailed notes about each release
• The PHP 8.0 preparation tasks page has the release timeline of the upcoming beta and release candidate (RC) releases
• You can download the PHP 8.0.0beta1 source from the downloads page