PHP 8
The PHP Group (Hacker News, Slashdot):
PHP 8.0 comes with numerous improvements and new features such as:
- Union Types
- Named Arguments
- Match Expressions
- Attributes
- Constructor Property Promotion
- Nullsafe Operator
- Weak Maps
- Just In Time Compilation
- And much much more…
Take a look at the PHP 8.0 Announcement Addendum for more information.
In the first part of this report we’ll outline the changes in PHP 8 that are likely to significantly impact WordPress and other legacy codebases. In the second part of this report, we’ll try to provide a perspective on past, present and future challenges regarding WordPress and PHP compatibility.
[…]
One of the most important breaking changes in PHP 8 has to do with strict typing. User-defined functions in PHP already throw a TypeError. However, internal functions emitted warnings and returned null. PHP 8 makes this consistent and internal functions now also throw a TypeError. This will not only impact functions that already threw warnings prior to PHP 8, but also magic methods (which previously weren’t type checked) and functions that have had type declarations introduced. For this reason, it’s not possible to catch all issues that arise from this change by fixing the type warnings in PHP 7.4 environments.
PHP8 broke my WordPress sites, and required manually untarring the update tarball and fixing theme functions to recover. Do not assume it will just work.