PHP Annotated – January 2025

Welcome to the January edition of PHP Annotated! This recap is carefully handcrafted and brings you the most interesting developments in the PHP community over the past couple of months, so you don’t have to sift through the noise, we’ve done it for you.

Highlights

• PHP 8.4

  PHP 8.4 was officially released on November 21, 2024, and by now, version 8.4.3 is already available.

  This major language update brings many new features, such as property hooks, asymmetric visibility, an updated DOM API, performance improvements, bug fixes, and general code cleanup.

  If you want to learn more about all the goodies in the release, visit php.watch and stitcher.io.

  There are also some lesser known improvements that you can learn more about from the Tideways blog:

  • PHP 8.4 improves Closure Naming for simplified debugging.
  • What’s new in PHP 8.4 in terms of performance, debugging, and operations.

  Install or upgrade to PHP 8.4

  • Windows: Compiled binaries available at windows.php.net.
  • Fedora/RHEL/CentOS: Available as a software collection (php84) from the Remi repo.
  • macOS: PHP 8.4 can be installed via Homebrew using the shivammathur/homebrew-php tap.
  • Docker: PHP 8.4 images are now available on Docker Hub with 8.4 tags.
  • Herd also comes with PHP 8.4 supported.

  Watch a