php

We'll be creating a Symfony/Spring inspired framework in PHP 8.5 and we'll be creating it from scratch. As for why, let me answer with a picture:

So, you know how readonly properties are, well… read-only? Turns out they’re not!

Originally, I intended to write an article about every single change in PHP 8.5, but then I realized that some of them don’t really warrant a full post. That didn’t stop me from trying, though.

Ever wanted to set a closure as a default parameter value in PHP, only having to come up with workarounds? In PHP 8.5, that frustration is gone. Closures can now be constant expressions — meaning they work anywhere you’d use a literal value.

One of PHP's longstanding limitations is that scalar values (strings, integers, arrays, etc.) cannot have methods. As a result, deeply nested operations often end up looking cluttered and hard to read:

As an interpreted language, PHP has inherent performance limitations, especially when it comes to CPU-bound tasks. Go, on the other hand, is a compiled language known for its speed and efficiency. By leveraging PHP’s Foreign Function Interface (FFI), we can call Go functions from PHP via a shared C layer and achieve significant performance improvements in the right scenarios.

This minor addition brings asymmetric visibility—already available for instance properties—to static properties as well.

Starting with PHP 8.5, you'll be able to do the following:

PHP has long had a levenshtein() function, but it comes with a significant limitation: it doesn’t support UTF-8.

This change is quite straightforward, so this won’t be a long article. PHP 8.5 adds support for annotating non-class, compile-time constants with attributes. Compile-time constants are those defined using the const keyword, not the define() function.