What PHP 7.4 Promises to Offer the Developers

PHP 7.4 is ready for release soon and it is expected to bring some major performance improvements along with some of the new features. Over the years PHP programming has become one of the most important frameworks to create dynamic web applications.  Fortunately, the latest features that it would bring is expected to improve the user experience. 

Why PHP is Considered to be the Best Server Side Programing Language:

PHP is the most popular programming language and the name is derived from Personal Home Page tools and now it stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP can be easily embedded into HTML and also interface with various languages like MySQL. Therefore, it is easy to learn and since it is an open source, it doesn’t need a licensing fee. It also offers great features that help to create rich websites.

Here, I have taken the initiative in this blog to update you with the latest properties that PHP 7.4 would bring to help the developers write standard and cleaner codes so as to improve the performance. So let’s get started!

Support for Typed Properties:

This is the property that has been missing in the PHP since long. They are available in the latest PHP 7.4 version and with this you can now easily declare the type hints to the class properties and variables. Earlier, this was not possible and the developers had to create methods to enforce type contracts. You can also declare the types on static properties.

Preloading for Improved Performance:

With the latest PHP 7.4 version there will also be a boost in the performance and developers can now configure opcache to compile the code files and then save in the shared memory. This will help to make the files available easily instead of having to compile them every time a request is sent.

This is similar to caching and the improved performance of the site helps to increase the efficiency of the site and have a better UX and meet the pressing deadlines.

 

Also Read: Useful PHP Techniques That Every Developer Should Know

 

New Support for Arrow Functions:

Anything that allows the developers to write shorter codes helps in improving PHP’s UX and the good news is that PHP 7.4 version will now include the arrow functions and this will help to shorten your anonymous functions. The arrow function works by defining the expressions in the parent scope and this can help when it comes to making the code less verbose.

Covariant Returns and Contravariant Parameters:

PHP has invariant parameters and return types and the sub type and super type must have similar constraints for return type and parameter. While determining the compatibility of the method with the parent, the engine should permit some less specific parameters and also more specific returns as the new types accept the types that are specific by the parents.

The parameter types can easily be substituted for its super types and the return types can now substitute the subtype and use the covariant types in the latest PHP versions.

Null Coalescing Assignment:

PHP 7 has already introduced the Null Coalescing Operation for the common usage of the ternary operator. The null coalescing operator (??) has been added as a syntactic sugar for the common case to use a ternary with isset(). This operation in PHP 7.4 helps to remove the code redundancy to a great extent.