Today is the day: PHP 8.1 is finally here!

Now, depending on when you read this mail, it might still be a few hours before you can actually download and install it: first the release managers must actually release the tagged version, and then package managers like Brew and Apt must update their dependencies as well.

I've already tried the release candidates on one of my real-life client projects (a Laravel 8 project), and am happy to say that out of 1.600 tests, only two failures were reported. That's of course thanks to the massive work of open source maintainers all around the world, who have already made their code PHP 8.1 compatible. You might need to look out for a couple of deprecations, but nothing that can't easily be fixed.

Just like previous years, this release is feature-packed and contains a couple of nifty performance improvements as well. If I had to pick my favourite top-three, I think it would look something like this.

1. enums:

enum Status
{
    case draft;
    case published;
    case archived;
    
    public function color(): string
    {
        return match($this) 
        {
            Status::draft => 'grey',   
            Status::published => 'green',   
            Status::archived => 'red',   
        };
    }
}

2. being able to use new in initializers:

class PostStateMachine
{
    public function __construct(
        private State $state = new Draft(),
    ) {
    }
}

3. readonly properties:

class PostData
{
    public function __construct(
        public readonly string $title,
        public readonly string $author,
        public readonly string $body,
        public readonly DateTimeImmutable $createdAt,
        public readonly PostState $state,
    ) {}
}

But I should also mention inheritance cache; while not visible in code, it's a feature that will noticeably improve performance of our PHP 8.1 projects. I tried it out on that one project with a very basic benchmark and did see an 8% performance improvement, I'll happily take that!

There is of course much more to this release, you can read all about it in my new in PHP 8.1 blog post; or subscribe to my Road to PHP 8.1 newsletter to get a daily mail for the coming 10 days, each day covering a new feature in depth.

Suffice to say, I am excited to start using PHP 8.1 in my projects. I'll probably give it a month or two before deploying it to production, but I definitely won't wait much longer. It's been great to see how PHP has grown over the past years, and I find it's a joy to work with day by day.

So what about you? What features are you most excited about? When will you be able to start using PHP 8.1? Let me know by replying to this mail!

With all of that being said, I hope you'll enjoy PHP 8.1 as much as I; until next time!

Brent