Thoroughly Modern: What’s New With PHP On IBM i?

December 7, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you use PHP on IBM i, you’ve likely seen some recent announcements about some great changes coming to the open-source language. According to the latest blog post from Zend on PHP 8, there are a number of new functions being introduced including str_contains, str_starts_with, and str_ends_with, preg_last_error_msg and get_debug_type. In addition, the core PHP 8 engine has many new features, optimizations and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency. The key areas include:

• JIT Compiler
• Fatal errors on incompatible method signatures
• LSP Enforcement
• Resource “Classes”
• Assertion behavior
• XML-RPC is now in PECL
• Reflection changes

This is …