A look at modern PHP
PHP has come a long way since its humble beginnings in 1995. While it was originally designed as a simple templating language, PHP has evolved into a full-featured, mature programming language powering over 75% of the websites on the internet today. Despite some lingering misconceptions, modern PHP is a fast, secure, and capable choice for building web applications of any scale.
Over the past several years, the PHP core team has made major strides in improving the language itself. PHP 7, released in 2015, offered massive performance gains - roughly doubling the speed of PHP 5.6. It also introduced useful features like scalar type declarations, return type declarations, and the spaceship operator. Subsequent 7.x releases have continued to optimize performance while adding new capabilities like nullable types, void functions, and more.
With PHP 8, the language is taking another big leap forward. Just-in-time (JIT) compiling promises additional performance boosts. New types like union types and match expression make the language more expressive. Named arguments, attributes, and property promotion streamline common tasks. All together, PHP 8 represents a significant upgrade for the language.
