The first release candidate for PHP 8.2.0, RC 1, is now out , bringing various bug fixes, including possible crash fixes. The PHP CLI's built-in web server also has various improvements to its handling of static resources.
According to the introduction , early development versions of PHP 8.2 include:
- Added support for defining constants in traits
- extension-specific Exceptions/Errors in Random code
- Updated MIME type table for built-in web server
- Reduced memory footprint of strings returned by various functions
- Preliminary support for macOS Instrument's JIT profiling generation
- New Random extension
- Cross-build on Windows with preliminary ARM64 support
- Allocate JIT buffer Opcache close to PHP .text section to allow direct IP related calls and jumps
- New options for PHP Sockets
- Support for new Curl options
- New ZipArchive method
- and other performance improvements...
It is expected that there will be at least five release candidates in the future. The next release, the second release candidate (RC 2), is scheduled to be released on September 15, 2022; while the PHP 8.2.0 GA release is expected to be around November 24 .
See the NEWS file or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrade instructions.