PHP Conference 2024: Main Announcements and Innovations

PHP Conference 2024: Main Announcements and Innovations

At the annual PHP conference, which gathered thousands of developers from around the world, key news was presented that will shape the development of the language and ecosystem for years to come. We have highlighted the most important announcements that every PHP developer should know.

PHP 8.4: Property Hooks and Other New Features

The main event was the presentation of the final version of PHP 8.4. The main innovation is the long-awaited property hooks. This feature allows developers to add logic when reading and writing class properties without using getters and setters, significantly simplifying the code.

• Property Hooks: write logic directly inside the property declaration.
• Asymmetric Visibility: property setting can be private, while reading can be public.
• Improved Enum Support: new methods for working with enumerations.
• Performance Optimization: array operations accelerated by up to 15%.

New JIT Compiler: Speed Like C?

At the conference, the work of the updated JIT compiler for PHP 8.5 (expected in 2025) was demonstrated. According to the authors, in benchmarks, PHP applications on synthetic tests achieve speeds comparable to C and Rust. The performance gain is especially noticeable in mathematical modeling tasks and processing large data arrays.

Laravel 12: Simplifying Microservices

The Laravel team announced Laravel 12, which will be released early next quarter. The main feature is built-in support for Message Bus for microservice architecture. Now there is no need to connect third-party libraries for exchanging messages between services.

• Native support for RabbitMQ and Kafka without additional packages.
• Improved Laravel Reverb — a real-time WebSocket server.
• New Livewire 4 with full SSR (Server-Side Rendering) support.

Symfony 7.2: Asynchrony and Security

Symfony developers presented Symfony 7.2 with a focus on asynchronous processing and security. Key points:

• Async Messenger: background task execution with automatic scaling.
• Security Bundle 2.0: support for Passkeys and WebAuthn for passwordless login.
• Automatic API Generation: based on Doctrine ORM using the new ApiGen component.

Community and Tools: What Else Was Shown?

The conference also presented a number of important tools that will make developers' lives easier:

• PHPStan 2.0 — a static analyzer with support for PHP 8.4 and improved type inference.
• Pest 3.0 — a testing framework with new syntax for property-based testing.
• Composer 3.0 — a new version of the dependency manager with parallel package loading (up to 3 times faster).

Summary: What to Take into Work?

The conference showed that PHP is not losing ground, but is actively evolving. The main