PHP started out as a small open-source project that evolved gradually as more and more people found out how useful it was. Rasmus Lerdorf released the first version of PHP way back in 1994. At that time, PHP stood for Personal Home Page, as he used it to maintain his personal homepage. Later on, he added database support and called it as “Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter” or PHP/FI, which could be used to build simple, dynamic web applications.
- Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3. The name of the language was also changed to the recursive acronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. They are also the authors of Zend Engine, a compiler and runtime environment for the PHP. Zend Engine powered PHP 4 was released in May 2000.
- PHP 5 was released in 2004, which included many new features such as OOP support, the PHP Data Objects (PDO), and numerous performance enhancements.
- PHP 7, is a new major PHP version which was developed in 2015. It included new language features, most notable being, the introduction of return type declarations for functions which complement the existing parameter type declarations, and support for the scalar types (integer, float, string, and boolean) in parameter and return type declarations.
New Features in PHP 8
PHP 8 is the latest major version, released in November 2020. Some of the new features and notable changes include:
Just-in-time (JIT) Compilation
PHP 8’s JIT compiler provides substantial performance improvements mathematical-type operations than for common web-development use cases. The JIT compiler provides the future potential to move some code from C to PHP.
The “match: Expression
The newly introduced “match” expression is more compact than a switch statement. Because match is an expression, its result can be assigned to a variable or returned from a function.
PHP 8 – Type Changes and Additions
PHP 8 introduced union types, a new static return type, and a new mixed type. PHP 8 also provided Attributes, (similar to “annotations” in other programming languages) that help in adding metadata to PHP classes.
In addition, there have been many changes and additions to the PHP standard library. PHP 8.2.9 is the latest stable version available.
Important milestones in PHP’s release history are summarized in the following table −
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
| Version 1.0 (8 June 1995) | Officially called “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools)”. This is the first use of the name “PHP”. |
| Version 2.0 (1 November 1997) | Officially called “PHP/FI 2.0”. This is the first release that could actually be characterised as PHP, being a standalone language with many features that have endured to the present day. |
| Version 3.0 (6 June 1998) | Development moves from one person to multiple developers.Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewritten the base for this version. |
| Version 4.0 (22 May 2000) | Added more advanced two-stage parse/execute tag-parsing system called the Zend engine. |
| Version 5.0 (13 July 2004) | Zend Engine II with a new object model. |
| Version 5.1 (24 November 2005) | Performance improvements with the introduction of compiler variables in re-engineered PHP Engine.Added PHP Data Objects (PDO) as a consistent interface for accessing databases. |
| Version 6.x Not released | Abandoned version of PHP that planned to include native Unicode support. |
| Version 7.0 (3 December 2015) | Zend Engine 3 ,Uniform variable syntax,Added Closure:call(),?? (null coalesce) operator,Return type declarations,Scalar type declarations,<=> “spaceship” three-way comparison operator,Anonymous classes |
| Version 7.3 (6 December 2018) | Flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc syntax |
| Version 8.0 (26 November 2020) | Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation,Arrays starting with a negative index,TypeError on invalid arithmetic/bitwise operators,Variable syntax tweaks,Attributes,Named arguments,Match expression,Union types, Mixed type,Static return type |
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