While most regular developers were enjoying time off with their families, the PHP dev team worked their best to bring new minor version of PHP with quite a few nice and useful features.
Everybody who follows the news of PHP world has already been excited about 7.4 for months, here’s a brief list of most important changes for those who missed it:
- Typed Properties
public string $name; - Arrow Functions
fn($x) => x * 2 - Type Covariance and Contravariance
- Null coalescing assignment operator
$array['key'] ??= computeDefault() - Unpacking Inside Arrays
['val1', 'val2', ...$val3to5, 'val6'] - Opcache Preloading
opcache.preload - Custom object serialization (
__serialize()and__unserialize()magic methods) - A few Deprecated Features (they had it coming)
See the complete PHP 7.4 migration guide for details.
Besides the major improvements, there’s a minor one I feel strongly about: nested ternary operators with parentheses missing are now deprecated. I’m glad to see them thrown out of the door, it’s about time people stop using them.
From now on all eyes are on PHP 8, which has quite a few interesting RFC’s being discussed or developed, and some are already implemented.