Why the feature-packed PHP 8 update can’t really wait

What about PHP 8?

PHP 8 – launched in November 2020 – is a pretty hefty update as updates go.

Positively packed with new features, functions and performance improvements – including union types, JIT (just in time), the nullsafe operator, named arguments, non-capturing catches – in other words an awful lot of coding language designed to make PHP more efficient and reliable.

While that’s not for us to worry about with a screen side view, those grafting away at the back end of website development are particularly overjoyed as it gifts them the pot of gold – the tools to write well-structured code.

The new features

Attributes

One of the most debated new features in PHP 8 is attributes, also known as “annotations”.

Attributes replace the docblocks metadata storage declaring metadata for classes, methods, functions, and arguments. Now, attributes can be declared with Syntax #[…].

Fallthrough

If a switch statement doesn’t have a break after each case, it will run to the next case, even if the intention was for the code to break. This allowed switch functions to execute several blocks of code in sequence but was the cause of many bugs.

Match (explained below) enforces an break after each arm and multiple conditions can be commanded with commas separating conditions.

JIT compiler

When PHP is run, it’s assembled into virtual instructions that are executed in a virtual machine. JIT changes this by assembling the code into x86 machine code and then running that code directly on the CPU. This will improve performance on applications that rely heavily on mathematical functions but won’t make much difference for your average web apps.

Match Expressions

Match Expressions intend to solve problems in Switch functionality.

Switch used a type-converting relational operator (==), which often caused bugs. Now, independent of strict_types, Match uses a strict comparison operator (===).

Mixed Types

In recent versions of PHP, it was possible to declare the expected type of input and return data. However, PHP did not always support Types, and this is a problem. In some cases, a Type was omitted or simply forgotten. MixedTypes now tries to solve this problem.

Named Arguments

Named arguments offer more flexibility when calling functions. Instead of calling a function and passing each argument in the order specified by the function, named arguments define a name for each parameter and can be called out of order.

Static Return Type

“The static special class name in PHP refers to the class a method was actually called on, even if the method is inherited. This is known as “late static binding” (LSB). This RFC proposes to make static also usable as a return type (next to the already usable self and parent types).”*

Static can’t be used as part of a parameter in this case, and refers to the class that was called.

Throw expressions

Throw statements are now expressions, enabling it to return a value. This makes throw usable in a wider spectrum of scenarios.

Union Types

Union types announce the type of value expected from an input (schema in some other languages). It’s defined by using a pipe | or pre-defined classes.