PHP 8.0 Release and the JIT Support

PHP has always been the most popular server side language that has helped the developers to create professional business websites. We know that PHP 7 has been awesome and had come up with huge improvements over PHP 5 in terms of performance and speed. Also it has brought with it a better user experience. But with time, it requires updates and so the next release is PHP 8 and users have very high expectations from it.

Though the release of PHP 8.0 is not scheduled yet, but as it is one of the major leaps, it will take some years. It takes years for the PHP group to release a major update and so it is assumed that the PHP 8 version will come out in September 2021, but there is no confirmation as yet.

The Inclusion of Just in Time in PHP:

There is not information about the features that will be included in the latest PHP development version, but there is a strong speculation that there will be JIT compilation. It is a dynamic compilation process which yields faster results than static or before runtime compilation processes. Most Java and .NET frameworks are dependent on JIT and it is fair for PHP to take advantage of the dynamic compilation and enhance its performance to the next level.  Zend has started developing a new JIT Engine and it is likely to be integrated with the major version of PHP, whenever the engine is ready and tested for launch.

 

Also Read: Latest PHP Trends of 2020 That Will Benefit Your Business Website

 

A spokesperson from Zend has also commented that they want to deliver some other useful features in the next major update. Just in time or JIT is a way of optimizing the running code during compilation and this method is already used by the Java Virtual Machine, HHVM and the V8 JavaScript VM. So JIT is nothing new.

Initially, before the evolution and release of PHP 7, it focused on improving the performance by using a JIT. This yielded substantial improvements, but it provided little development in real world applications like Joomla and WordPress.  After it proved significant improvements in PHP 7.0, the later versions 7.1 and 7.2 have been rather modest.  And this became the reason for the team to work on the JIT implementation once again in the PHP 8.0 version. So a code that is written in PHP 7, when implemented in the latest version of PHP 8, the execution time will be reduced by half.

Why PHP has Decided to Introduce JIT?

PHP has done many improvements in its previous versions, which included the optimizations for the HashTable, specializations in the Zend VM, in the compiler for certain sequences and etc. After so many improvements JIT is the next ability to improve further.

With the JIT support, PHP developers will be able to create built-in functions instead of C without having any huge performance penalty. This will make the framework less susceptible to overflows, memory management and other issues that are associated with C developments.

By adding the support of JIT in PHP, it will allow the use in scenarios for which it is not considered today that is in other CPU intensive scenarios, or in other non-web scenarios where the performance benefits will be very substantial.

 

Also Read: Useful PHP Techniques That Every Developer Should Know