BoltFlare is committed to using up-to-date technologies, and not just letting things slide. On November 28, 2019, PHP 7.4 was officially released. While we do not automatically update your PHP version, we offer the option for you to upgrade or downgrade your PHP version.
There are always good things happening with PHP, as it still remains the dominant language of the Internet, is ever-evolving, and with each new release, contains new features, loses a few old features, and somehow always seems to be faster than its previous version. To put it bluntly, PHP 7.0 is the slowest, while PHP 7.4 is the fastest. PHP 7.2 is faster than PHP 7.1 which is slower than PHP 7.3. While we will not get into every single change, we did notice some cool neat features, as well as the loss of a few as well.
Letting things slide is common in the web hosting industry; at the time of writing in December 2019, over 3 in 5 WordPress sites (the most popular website building tool) run on versions of PHP that have been end-of-lifed by the PHP group.
Accordingly, we have updated the default version of PHP used for new web hosting accounts from PHP 7.3 to 7.4. All customers can continue to request a different PHP version (from 5.7 up to the latest available, 7.4) to suit their requirements.
PHP Changes
Deprecated in PHP 7.4 are:
- Nested ternary operators without explicit parentheses
- Array and string offset access using curly braces
- Extensions moved to PECL and are no more part of the PHP distribution: Firebird/Interbase, Recode, and WDDX
Additions to PHP 7.4 are:
- Typed Properties
- Arrow Functions
- Limited return type covariance and argument type contravariance
- Null coalescing assignment operator
- Unpacking inside arrays
- Numeric literal separator
- cURL feature updates including support for stream wrappers and plain filenames
- Additional Filters
- GD improvements
- New FFI extension
- More Hashes
- Multibyte Strings
- Opcache Preloading
- And more!
For more details on all of these new features implemented into PHP 7.4, refer to: PHP 7 ChangeLog.