A few days ago the PHP foundation announced that PHP v8.2-stable will become available on December 8th. This is a major update to PHP which extends the language with new features while improving both performance and resource usage.

Some PHP History

Like most PHP releases this is important not just for us but for the wider web developer community as PHP still drives 77.5% of all websites as of November 2022 (source: w3techs.com). To put it simply, PHP continues to be a pretty big deal.

If you've been reading our blog for a while it should come as no surprise that we make extensive use of PHP for our website and API. This was a bet we made way back in 2016 that PHP as a language would continue to be available and actively maintained.

We looked at other projects at that time built on PHP such as WordPress and what we saw from other developers gave us confidence to move ahead with it. Now we're many years away from that decision and we don't at all regret it, the language has been great for us and continues to improve in every way.

The PHP Foundation

Just a quick sidebar, the PHP foundation just celebrated its first year in operation, you may be thinking that's a typo as PHP has been around since 1997 but it's a fact. Last year in November 2021 the PHP foundation was created and will sponsor the design and development of PHP going forward. I would say their first year has been a great success.

Our current PHP deployment & preparations

So with the history out of the way let's focus on PHP v8.2. Firstly we should mention that we like to stay current, we're using PHP v8.1.13 which was released only a few days ago and that's because every new PHP version brings with it performance improvements, code syntax updates, new features and lower resource usage. All of these things are great for our API as it means we get them for practically free on a regular basis.

Now I say practically because sometimes there are changes which break some prior code. The PHP developers sometimes need to break some functionality to move forward and this is where our preparation for PHP v8.2 comes into play.

Like when we updated to PHP v8.1 that we mentioned in this blog post almost exactly a year ago we need to test and validate that our existing code still runs and runs well. We've been doing that using the PHP v8.2 release candidates. So far it looks good and we believe we'll be able to update to PHP v8.2 quite quickly in December.

PHP v8.2's performance improvements

As we mentioned above one of the things new versions of PHP regularly provide is performance improvements and PHP v8.2 is no different. According to phoronix.com there is a healthy 2.5% average performance improvement over PHP v8.1. And we should note this test was performed very early in the v8.2 development cycle, in-fact it was conducted back in May 2022.

In our testing with the latest release candidate we've seen a better average for the specific functions we make use of in our code and when extrapolated across the billions of requests we answer those performance improvements matter. Essentially the faster our code can execute the more requests we can handle per second on each of our servers.

PHP v8.2's new features

The last thing we wanted to talk about was the PHP v8.2 features we're excited about.

Firstly, we're gaining readonly classes. Pretty self-explanatory, we'll likely make use of this for some of our code data fills that we want to be immutable. Secondly, we're getting a new randomizer class which is essentially a better random number generator with swappable engines. Thirdly, redactable parameters in backtraces. This allows for sensitive data to be removed from error reporting before it leaves the PHP runtime, improving privacy and security.

There are some other changes we like but they mainly deal with alterations to preexisting functions and are a bit too nuanced to explain briefly here.

So that's our PHP update. As we mentioned at the start PHP v8.2 launches on December 8th and we fully intend to be upgraded next month. There are some great performance wins in this release and PHP as a language is looking very healthy, we're looking forward to using all the new features in the coming year and seeing what PHP 9.0 brings!

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful week!