As we all know, many changes occur in technology with time. Unfortunately, with all the changes, PHP 8.1 has also experienced many changes, and if you want to hire a PHP developer, you will need to ensure that developers know the differences.
The article below will discuss the changes made in the latest version of PHP 8.1.2. Make sure to know the differences before developing a web application as you can cope with the trends in the market.
PHP is mainly a general-purpose scripting language used for web app development. Earlier it was used for developing personal home pages.
Latest features in PHP
Intersection types
The latest version of PHP 8.1.2 supports intersection types. It is identical to the union types previously introduced in version 8.0, but their usage is the opposite.
Indeed, you will be allowed to add type declarations to function the arguments, return values, and class properties. Such a task will be known as type hinting and ensure the value is of the correct type at call time.
Enums
The latest version of PHP 8.1 will add support for enumerations. Enums are user-defined data types that consist of a set of possible values. Therefore, it can also be known as enumerated types of enums.
They are the types that have a fixed number of possible values. Enumerations are likely in a huge number of programming languages and have often been a requested feature for PHP language.
Never return types
The latest version of PHP 8.1.2 has introduced a new return type hint known as never. Therefore, it is very helpful to use functions that will always throw and exit.
The latest never type the return type hint for functions that shouldn’t return. Such feature is only used in functions which is always for exit or throw an exception.
Fibers
In the past, PHP code has always seen asynchronous code. The code execution waits until the result is returned, even for the input-output operations. Such a process can reduce the code execution speed.
You will get multiple third-party services to defeat such a hurdle, enabling the developers to write the PHP code asynchronously, particularly for concurrent input-output operations.
Improvement in performance
The inheritance cache is the latest edition which will reduce the PHP class inheritance upward. The PHP classes are combined and cached separately.
Although, it is already linked at the run time on each request. The process can also involve compatibility checks and borrowing properties from the parent class and traits.
Due to it, the result will take some time to execute, even though the result will be the same for each request.
Read More: Hackers Are Using A Malicious PHP Script By Magento Killer
Readonly property
The latest version of PHP 8.1 has added support for read-only properties.
However, it can only be loaded once from the field where they have been declared
before.
Once you have loaded the properties, it is impossible to modify the value. If you do,
it will show an error exception. Loading only once feature in PHP has largely eliminated
pattern code that allows such functionality.
New functions
In the latest version of PHP, new functions are added, which are fsync () and fdatasync ().
You can hire a PHP developer to use the new functions and implement them in the code.
The new functions have similarities to the existing function fflush (), which is used for flushing
buffers in the operating system. Although, both the latest functions will flush the buffer to the
physical storage.
Conclusion
The PHP language keeps on evolving and advancing with the new version, which provides
flexibility and improves the website's performance. If you hire a PHP developer, they will
help you develop the website according to the latest trends.
The latest PHP version, 8.1.2, provides us with many new features, especially for its object
model. In addition, enums were requested for a long time to make the code more precise
and predictable.
I hope you will find the blog useful to learn the latest version involved in PHP language.
