PHP7 is evolving! What’s new?

7.1 and the upcoming 7.2 release make PHP even more awesome!

While I’m currently writing the next part of my “A look into sessions and security” series, I couldn’t help to take some time to write on how fast PHP7 is evolving.

PHP 7.0 was, in my opinion, the most important PHP release since PHP 5.3: it brought us new operators, awesome functionalities and even the possibility to code with strict typing — at least to a point. It’s amazing to see how fast the language keeps evolving after the .0 release and how the new functionalities themselves brought a plethora of new issues. In case you don’t know this already, you can easily follow the process of each release here.

PHP 7.1 (the current stable release) already brought us a lot of interesting features and PHP 7.2 (currently in alpha and planned for release at the end of November) will get us a few more. These are the ones that are most noticeable, in my opinion:

PHP 7.1

• Nullable Types, RFC by Levi Morrison and Dmitry Stogov:
  A much needed improvement over the typing system, this makes possible to pass a NULL value to a parameter of any type.

$bar in this case MUST receive either a string or NULL.
$baz MAY receive an int, NULL or be omitted, defaulting to NULL.

• The end of Mcrypt, RFC by Scott Arciszewski:
  It’s a known fact that Mcrypt is considered abandonware: it was last updated ≃ 5 years ago and it has open tickets dating back to 2003. Being an extension related to security and having a much more reliable project such as openssl available made Mcrypt’s end inevitable.
• Void Return Type, RFC by Andrea Faulds:
  Another inherent need of PHP7’s typing system: the ability to write functions/methods that doesn’t return a value.

• Support Class Constant Visibility, RFC by Sean DuBois:
  This one will probably see a slower rate of adoption of even interest, but it’s very useful (and arguably an obvious need) in the context of OO: the ability to define class constants as public, protected or private.

PHP 7.2

• Argon2 Password Hash, RFC by Charles R. Portwood II
  Argon2 is the newest and most talked about hashing algorithm in actuality and rightly so: it won the Password Hashing Competition, beating 23 competitors. Starting on PHP 7.2, Argon2 will be available to be used in the password_hash functions.
• Debugging PDO Prepared Statement Emulation, RFCs by Adam Baratz
  Probably one of the most awaited features on the language, it is as clear and straightforward as it sounds: starting on PHp 7.2 we’ll finally be able to show the resulting query of a prepared statement.
• Object typehint, RFC by Michał Brzuchalski
  A much needed addition to the typing system, the ability to declare a parameter and/or a return type as a “generic” object. Since I’m currently developing my applications relying heavily on the typing system this is, for me, the most awaited addition to it.

Conclusion

PHP7 is a thing of beauty. The amount and quality of the changes being implemented are incredible and they are lifting the language and it’s ecosystem to a whole new level. There are a lot of other RFCs that I’ve missed here and the process is entirely public so please, go check it out and keep yourself informed and current!

Long live PHP7! ❤