PHP 8

The PHP RFC for enumerations just passed a 44-7 vote to be accepted as a new feature in the upcoming PHP 8.1 release!

Enumerations, also known as “enums”, are a special data type that can only contain specific, predefined (or “enumerated”) values. They behave somewhat similar to constants, in that their names can be referenced in code, but they allow for stronger typing.

The classic use case illustrated by the RFC is of an enum that defines different suits of playing cards:

enum Suit {
  case Hearts;
  case Diamonds;
  case Clubs;
  case Spades;
}

PHP 8.0 has just been released! This new major version adds several significant features and improvements to the language like attributes, match expressions, Just-In-Time compilation (JIT), and much more!

Here’s a brief guide on how to install PHP 8.0 on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X:

Ubuntu

The first beta release of PHP 8 is here and you can start testing it today with Docker.