WHAT'S NEW & MOST ESSENTIAL FEATURES IN PHP 8

PHP 8 is here! It was released on November 26, 2020. You can download it here . It's a new major version, which means that it will introduce some breaking changes, as well as lots of new features and performance improvements. Because of the breaking changes, there's a higher chance you'll need to make some changes in your code to get it running on PHP 8. If you've kept up to date with the latest releases though, the upgrade shouldn't be too hard, since most breaking changes were deprecated before in the 7.* versions. And don't worry, all these deprecations are listed in this post. Besides breaking changes, PHP 8 also brings a nice set of new features such as the JIT compiler, union types, attributes, and more.

NEW FEATURES

1. Union Types
2. JIT
3. The nullsafe operator
4. Named Arguments
5. Attributes
6. Match Expressions
7. Constructor Property Promotion
8. New static return type
9. New mixed type
10. Throw expression
11. Inheritance with private methods
12. Weak Maps
13. Allowing ::class on objects
14. Non-capturing catches
15. Trailing comma in parameter lists
16. Create DateTime objects from interface
17. New Stringable interface
18. New str_contains() function
19. New str_starts_with() and str_ends_with() functions
20. New fdiv() function
21. New get_debug_type() function
22. New get_resource_id() function
23. Abstract methods in traits improvements
24. Object implementation of token_get_all()
25. Variable syntax tweaks
26. Type annotations for internal functions externals
27. ext-json always available
28. Just In Time Compilation