PHP Conference 2024: Key Announcements and Innovations

PHP Conference 2024: Main Announcements and Innovations

Last week, the annual international PHP Conference 2024 concluded in Berlin. The event gathered over 2,000 developers from around the world, as well as key members of the PHP community and representatives of the PHP Foundation. The main theme this year was the future of the language: from the long-awaited release of PHP 8.4 to radical changes in the ecosystem. We have compiled the most important announcements that will affect every PHP developer's work.

1. PHP 8.4: Release Date and Key Innovations

It was officially announced that PHP 8.4 will be released on November 21, 2024. This version will be one of the most significant updates in recent years. Among the main innovations:

• Property hooks — a long-awaited feature to override behavior when reading and writing object properties without using getters and setters. This will simplify code and reduce boilerplate.
• Async generators — now it is possible to combine generators with coroutines, paving the way for more efficient work with data streams and streams.
• Improved JIT compiler — the second major JIT update, which, according to developers, provides a performance increase of up to 30% on computational tasks. JIT will now be enabled automatically for most modern processors.
• Deprecation of old functions — the mysql_* functions and a number of utilities from the standard extension have been finally marked as deprecated. Developers are strongly urged to switch to PDO or mysqli.

2. New JIT Compiler: A Revolution in Performance

A separate report was dedicated to the second generation of the JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler for PHP. The first version, introduced in PHP 8.0, provided a boost in synthetic tests, but the effect on real projects was modest. The new version (JIT v2) uses dynamic profiling and more aggressive loop optimization. In a demonstration, a Symfony application with heavy business logic showed a 2.2x speedup compared to PHP 8.3. It is expected that this will make PHP competitive not only in web development but also in data processing tasks.

3. Asynchrony and Coroutines: Fibers Become the Standard

Fibers, introduced in PHP 8.1, have finally received full support in the standard library. A new PSR (PHP Standard Recommendation) for asynchronous middleware was announced at the conference. Also presented was a prototype of the ext-async extension, which allows writing asynchronous code almost as simply as synchronous code — without callbacks and cumbersome Promises. This could fundamentally change the approach to developing high-load APIs and real-time applications in PHP.

4. The Future of PHP: From the Web to a Universal Platform

In the concluding panel discussion, leaders of the PHP Foundation outlined the strategy for 2025–2026. The main goals:

• Full support for asynchronous I/O in the language core (similar to Go and Kotlin).
• Improving the type system — introducing generics at the syntax level is being considered.