As promised in our platform update announcement earlier this year, we’ve now followed up the rollout of PHP 7.4 with version 8.0.

PHP 8.0 is a major update of the PHP language. Here’s a selection of the new features and optimisations that it ships with:

• JIT: PHP 8 introduces two JIT compilation engines that improve performance.
• Match expression: match allows to build expressions similar to the classic ternary operator but with more conditions.
• Nullsafe operator: A new ?-> operator only calls methods if the object sending the message exists, otherwise returns null.
• Named arguments: Named function parameters can be put in any order or left out to apply default values. They’re also self-documenting.
• Attributes: PHPDoc annotation comments are replaced by a native syntax for structured metadata.
• Constructor property promotion: Constructors get a more concise syntax for defining and assigning properties at the same time.

Drupal introduced support for PHP 8.0 in version 9.1, WordPress in version 5.6.

freistilbox customers can simply select PHP 8.0 as the language runtime environment for new or existing websites on the freistilbox dashboard. We’re excited to see the amazing websites that PHP 8.0 will allow our customers to build!