January 11, 2014
Chris
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Comments Off on PHP 5.6 announced, statically typed (!) “new” PHP announced by Facebook devs

PHP 5.6 announced, statically typed (!) “new” PHP announced by Facebook devs

PHP 5.6 goes alpha

PHP 5.6 has been announced for a while now, and these days things get serious (code-freeze, alpha release). Bruno Skvorc of Sitepoint has released an excellent article on SOME of the new things in PHP 5.6, definitly worth reading. The changes are “smaller” (as far as I can judge this), no huge things that will change everything.

 

Facebook works on (and with) a “better” PHP, called Hack

As we are talking about new versions of PHP already: Keep your eyes open for HACK for HIPHOP. Facebook, who have already developed the game-changing HipHop-VirtualMachine that allows to precompile PHP for extreme speed gains, will release HACK, an improved version of the PHP language (!!) in the near future. No joke (or a very big one, but this looks promising). Julien Verlaguet of Facebook has presented this at the CUFP/ICFP 2013 (a Boston based conference), this seems to be very very interesting: They even made PHP a statically typed language (!). This might have a great future, definitly something we should keep an eye on.

 

Current PHP:

<?php

class MyClass {
    public $property;
}

Hack (for the HipHop VM), the “improved” PHP:

<?hh // note this ! ;)

class MyClass {
    // note the type definition
    public float $property;
}

 

 

Talk of Julien Verlaguet of Facebook:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKWNjFagR9k

Slides of that talk:
http://cufp.org/sites/all/files/slides/2013/verlaguet.pdf

Much more interesting slides, showing syntax etc. by Keith Adams of Facebook:
http://de.slideshare.net/zerutreck/taking-php-seriously-keith-adams