PHP 7.4 Released With FFI, Typed Properties, Arrow Functions, Better Performance

PHP 7.4 is out this US Thanksgiving day as the newest feature release for the PHP scripting language. PHP 7.4 comes with a number of prominent language additions while, yes, also having even better performance on the PHP series.

Among the highlights of this annual PHP7 update are:

- The Foreign Function Interface for accessing C structures / functions / variables from PHP code. The FFI extension is finally in place!

- Nice performance improvements over earlier PHP releases.

- The Opcache preload functionality as another route for even better performance on PHP 7.4.

- Support for typed properties... Yes, in 2019, PHP finally supports (optional) type declarations on class properties!

- Arrow functions as a shorthand means of defining functions with implicit by-value scope binding.

- The null coalescing assignment operator makes it easier to write some common PHP code.

- Custom object serialization via new magic methods of __serialize and __unserialize.

- proc_open() improvements.

More details on the many changes to find with PHP 7.4.0 via PHP.net.